The Catch
by The Cheery One
Summary: The year is 2032 A.D. What is left of mankind has fought to survive for the past 28 years. After an inexplicable massive defeat to Skynet, The Resistance is shattered and a small group of Catchers - those specialising in capturing and reprogramming Terminators - are displaced and isolated, when they discover a stranger in a wreckage. (Alternate ending for Terminator Franchise)
1. The Betrayal

**The Catch \- _A Terminator Fanfiction_**

Notes and Disclaimers: I of course do not have any rights to the intellectual properties of the Terminator franchise. This is a work of fanfiction - a homage to James Cameron and other talented creators behind these fantastic movies. Due to split continuity, this fanfiction acknowledges the events of T1, T2 and T3 as canon and disregards _Terminator Salvation_ and _Terminator Genysis_, for simplicity's sake.

I wrote this fanfiction a while ago. It has 23 chapters and provides an alternate ending to the Terminator franchise, since honestly I don't like any of the later movies after T3. I wanted to get this story out there before _Terminator: Dark Fate_ is released. Enjoy and leave a review! :)

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_"The year is 2032 A.D. The Resistance has fought to survive for the past 28 years. Among the key members of The Resistance are the Catchers: those who specialise in capturing and reprogramming Skynet's various Terminators. Over the years, thousands of Terminators have been reprogrammed into Guardians. Five have been sent through time. Following a major defeat that devastated The Resistance, a small group of catchers are displaced and distraught, when one day they come upon a strange man in a wreckage." _

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**Chapter One - The Betrayal **

Streaks of lightning charged in circles under the arches of the time machine, blacking out the room. The light became so bright that the people crowded all around, despite being fixated on the time machine, could see barely anything. Their eyes were unblinking, nervous white specks of reflection on their silhouette faces.

Then in an instant the energy snapped in on itself and disappeared. There was a moment of silence and total darkness, before the blinking fluorescent lights in the ceiling of the large hall came back on again, revealing an emptied time machine.

The hall was packed full of people: a crowd of three or four dozen, comprised of human soldiers and reprogrammed Terminators. They were all crowded around the time machine at the center of the room, with three soldiers at the control panel.

Their first time operating the time machine was tense but not unbearable, because they were sending through a Terminator - a benevolent reprogrammed T-800 and certainly very important to them, yet he didn't carry the weight of a human life.

But this was their second time. This time was different. This time they had just sent through their loyal friend Kyle Reese, who fought alongside them for decades, and they all knew he was not coming back. For the next few moments, the members of the group exchanged glances and whispers of reassurance, letting go of the breaths they had been holding, and finally letting their weariness show. It was a long road to this point - a road that had gunfire and death at every turn - and they were almost at the end.

John Connor, standing at the base of the time machine platform, faced his Resistance and spoke up. "Good work everyone. Thank you," he said. "I owe everything to you and I owe everything to Reese. He is a brave soldier, our fellow." His voice was heavy. "I know that every one of us here today has felt again and again what it's like to lose someone, someone important, a part of us. The end of the struggle is near. Soon, there will be no more loss and no more death. There's only one more we have to send-"

He was interrupted when the automatic double-doors of the hall slid open and two soldiers walked in. They were Captain Parker and Lieutenant Eustice, who had long fought under John Connor's command.

"Sir," they addressed John. "We've completed our analysis of the cold storage area. Skynet has twenty-two Terminators in storage at this base. They're in factory condition, CPUs disabled and unlocked. It appears two have been recently deployed: One of the T-800 series and one of the T-1000 series."

"Everything checks out, then," replied John. "The T-800 was the one sent back to 1984 to kill my mother, and the T-1000 to 1995 to kill me when I was ten. What about the third one?"

"Third one?"

"The T-X Terminator, the one with a female skin sheath. It was sent back to the year 2003 to target Kate and I, and eight other Resistance members, when we were teenagers. Has it been accounted for?"

Captain Parker looked confused. He skimmed over the data in his tablet. "Sir, we've accessed everything on SkyNet's hard drives since breaching this base, but there's no record of a Terminator series called T-X."

"I've never even seen a female Terminator," said Lieutenant Eustice. "Are you sure it was sent from this base, Sir?"

"As far as I'm aware, this is the only time machine SkyNet has, so it _must_ be," said John Connor. He stayed calm, but he couldn't hide the look of worry that was spreading across his face. How could there be no record of the T-X? Even the faintest possibility of more SkyNet bases out there was a horrifying thought. He paused for a moment and collected himself.

"I'll have to discuss this matter with Kate again," said John. He turned back to his fellows. "For the meantime, continue on as planned. Parker - you will take your platoon to Fort Spict to investigate the possible clandestine Cyberdyne storeroom there. The rest of us stay behind and recuperate for now. We will have another meeting later today. Good work, everyone, you are dismissed."

The group nodded, and one by one they scattered and went about their duties.

"This is not how it's supposed to be..." John said to himself as he picked up his assault rifle, disengaging the magazines that had been mangled during the seige of the previous night, whereby they took down the gates of the last SkyNet base they knew of and drove in on their armoured trucks and broke through the doors of the time machine hall, in what they thought was a final march of victory.

He sat down beside the control panel and called Kate on his transceiver - a rather primitive piece of technology that proved most reliable in the apocalyptic world. It was taking longer than usual for Kate to pick up, but it didn't concern John too much since he knew she was busy outside with the helicopter repair squad.

As he waited, he had an incredibly uneasy feeling. The absence of any records of the T-X came as a complete surprise for John. Ever since his earliest memories, he always knew what the future held - Judgement Day would come, he would lead The Resistance, meet his own father and send him back to the past, and now it seemed he was on the verge of defeating SkyNet just as it was foretold.

So far, all the events that happened lined up with his expectations, but this one entirely defied it. He realised he never really knew for sure where the T-X came from, or even who sent it. He assumed SkyNet had sent it in the same way as the other two Terminators.

_How could it not be? _He thought._ Has SkyNet erased records and covered up its tracks? What else can I be wrong about? _He conjured up a million worrisome ideas.

His train of thought was interrupted when he heard someone approaching him. It was one of his Terminators, the T-800 that had been with him longest. Everyone knew he had a soft spot for this particular Terminator because it was of the 101 model appearance.

"I'm back," The Terminator said with his thick Austrian accent. "I'll help you with magazines."

"Yeah, I'd like some help."

The Terminator sat down beside John, took the messed up magazine that John had removed from the rifle and began removing the bullets. _Click, clack, click, clack._ Methodical and faster than any person. He stripped out the remaining ammo from the jammed magazine and chucked the trash onto the floor.

John reached over to the Terminator and pulled off his dark glasses. "Don't be such a dork all the time, remember? You look friendlier without the glasses."

"Quit it, dickhead," he replied monotonously.

John laughed and put the glasses in his pocket. _Who taught him that one? _

All around the hall there was a variety of different Terminators working alongside the soldiers - different models, different series. All reprogrammed, all so friendly, all so loyal. They were all family to John. He thought he could count on them for anything.

There were two of them helping a group of five survivors off one of their trucks, only these were no ordinary survivors, they were the most special of all survivors to John and the rest: the children, the hope for humanity to have a future even after all this devastation. They all looked so happy to be here, despite everything. They smiled and laughed as the friendly Terminators carried them down from the truck.

As John collected up and inspected the bullets that the Terminator stripped out, Kate's distorted voice came from his transceiver. "_Kate Brewster Connor receiving. John?_"

"Yes, Kate, there's a problem here, I need to talk to you," said John, holding the transceiver in one hand and the loose bullets in the other. "Could you-"

He stopped short. As he was talking, from the corner of his eye he saw the Terminator draw the old shotgun from his holster. Alarmed, John turned to see what was happening, and found himself staring down the gun barrel. He dropped the loose bullets he held and they scattered, clinking, clacking, all over the floor. The Terminator pulled the trigger, the gunfire exploding into a cloud of red. John was knocked to the ground.

Thanks to his instinct to duck, the shot had caught him in the shoulder and his armoured vest took some of the blast. "What are you doing?!" He yelled. He struggled to get away from the Terminator.

But the Terminator didn't answer. He reloaded the shotgun.

John pulled out his own sidearm - a pistol developed by The Resistance themselves, with internally-superheated rounds. He aimed at the Terminator. "I order you to drop your gun!" he yelled. His voice was shaking and he could barely hear himself through the ringing in his head after taking shotgun fire at point blank.

But again there was silence, as if the Terminator suddenly no longer heard him. He pointed the shotgun at John.

John put his finger on the trigger. He hovered the laser pointer of his pistol between the Terminator's eyes. All it would take was one shot from this type of gun, and the CPU would be blown apart like sand.

Yet as he met the Terminator's eyes, John wavered. The familiar blue eyes, shaded under greying eyebrows, the eyes of the only man there for him in his childhood...a father to him. Even when all common sense told him to shoot this machine that had suddenly and inexplicably turned against him, who had a shotgun _pointed_ at him, he still couldn't. The trigger weighed a thousand tons.

John rolled to the side as the Terminator fired, shattering tiles from the floor. Then he scrambled to his feet and ran, clutching his shoulder that had been blasted by the earlier shot.

"_John? John? Come in, John. What's happening?_" Kate's voice came from the transceiver that had fallen to the floor.

The Terminator fired again, missed John and blew a hole in the wall beyond.

John had run to the double doors when he heard a concorde of different gunshots firing, and realised that each and every one of their Terminators in the room had drawn their guns and started firing on the soldiers at once. Gunshots and smoke and blood filled the air, as did panicked screams and commands that suddenly fell on deaf ears. _Why?_

"Retreat! Evacuate! This way!" John commanded his fellows. One by one those who remained standing fled towards the exit, firing back at the mutinied Terminators swarming after them. Perhaps half managed to leave the hall, all injured and shocked. John exited the double-doors and slammed his hand onto the big red button outside, leaving a bloody handprint. The double-doors snapped shut.

His group ran through the empty yard outside the hall, flanked with large hangars, calling for help, panting, and he followed after them. _This can't be happening. _

And then they saw the last nail in the coffin. Around the hangars, too, were Terminators - their own Terminators, some of which John recognised even from far away - that were firing at the people. They had been friendly just moments before. From behind the hangars bicopter and tricopter planes rose up, which belonged to The Resistance too. John had no time to consider how and why.

"Get into the trucks!" He ferried his group of people into the three beat-up trucks that had carried the fighters before they conquered SkyNet's base.

Gunshots sounded from behind him and the double-doors to the hall were blown off. Out walked the Terminator with the shotgun, in his determined march of death, a look all too familiar to John. John knew this one was coming for him and him alone.

"Go quickly!" he told his fellows, while he himself backed away from the trucks and stayed behind. One by one they drove away from the complex in a cloud of dust, as the corrupted bicopters and tricopters hovered above and shot at them.

The Terminator walked closer. John ran to take cover between the hangars, but before he made it there, the Terminator's shotgun fired. The bullet grazed his leg and John fell to his knees. The world swayed and the loud gunshots from all around sounded like distant chiming bells. He could also hear Kate's voice calling from somewhere.

He dragged himself behind the hangar, fighting against the pain. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the Terminator emerge from around the corner, staring down at him; a personification of mortality that was always by his side.

The Terminator cocked the gun again and pointed it at John.

_Chapter One - End_


	2. The Stranger

**Chapter Two - The Stranger **

The road was in disrepair, crumbling, but this was expected - now there were few roads not crumbling. To either side of the road was land once covered in cornfields, though nothing was left of any plants now, not least because it had been one long nuclear winter for the past twenty-eight years, ever since hundreds of bombs fell from the sky on Judgement Day.

A group of five walked along this road. At the very front and very back of the group were two identical Terminators - both were of the T-800 series, Cyberdyne Systems Model 101, though one was much older than the other.

The front-leading Terminator, the older of the two, looked around alertedly as he walked. He held a heavy assault rifle with the scope missing and wore thick boots and a combat vest over a well-worn leather jacket. His hair had gone grey and his hands were covered in bandages. His face showed scars from many past wounds, though they had all healed. Evidently, his organic exoskeleton had been well cared for.

The younger, brown-haired Terminator at the back of the group was a little more unusual. He had a rifle too, and a plentiful assortment of sidearms holstered to his waistband, but he also had what appeared to be an oversized fanny pack strapped tightly to him, which emanated a weird humming noise. He wore a long feather-down puffer jacket loosely over himself to cover it, but it did no good. The pack was as noticeable as a beached whale.

Between the Terminators there walked three people - two women and a man. The older man and woman, who appeared to be in their thirties, were dressed in tatty military garb with utility bags slung over their shoulders. The younger woman would probably be of school-going age if schools still existed. They were all thin and weary and looked even thinner beside the Terminators' burly figures.

The young woman pointed to their right. "Look!" she said, "Look there - there's smoke!"

The older woman took a pair of compact binoculars out of her bag and to her eyes. "Ava's right...there is something there. It's quite far. Whatever it is, it's got to be big to be giving off that much black smoke. Here, Conrad, you have a look." She passed the binoculars to the man.

"Yes, definitely something there," he replied dryly. He then put the binoculars back into the bag and turned away, continuing down the road.

"Don't just say that! Let's go see what it is."

"No, Brenda, we can't," he said, "We have to make it to the storehouse soon. Please, for goodness' sake, we don't even know if there'll be enough supplies there, we're already gambling on borrowed time. And also-" He stopped himself, a pained look on his face. "You never know what SkyNet thinks up for traps. You want a second time machine base incident?"

"No, but...I have a feeling it might be someone signalling us," said Brenda. "It's been months since we've come across _anybody_. Con, we _have_ to go. We just have to. We can't leave somebody behind. Besides, we're not in that much danger. We've still got _them_." She gestured to the Terminators.

Ava tugged at Conrad's sleeve, and finally he said, "Alright, let's go. We might not get to the storehouse then..."

"Then I'll skip a meal and you can eat it," Brenda said jokingly, already walking off the road, through the mud in the direction of the smoke, and Ava too.

Conrad grimaced. He loaded his handgun and followed after them, gesturing for the two Terminators to keep up. "Both of you stay on guard at all times."

"Yes," they said simultaneously.

They walked across the field. Far away there were still some evergreen trees which had managed to live on. Even further away were the silhouettes of blue mountains, their flat ridges resting against the sky, indifferent to all of humanity's successes and failures. But even here where they walked, all that remained were plowed indents in the ground to remind them that someone once tended to this place. They were so small, cupped in the palm of the valley.

After a while the source of the smoke appeared. It was a wreckage, flames already burnt out, of what appeared to be a small bicopter, the kind that could take off and fly quickly but only carried one or two passengers. One of its engines had blown out and it had crashed quite disastrously.

Brenda walked up to the craft, eyeing it, covering her face. The smell of burnt machinery was choking. On the side of it she could just about make out the black lettering - **Cyberdyne BC-7337**.

Over this lettering there were words hand-written in red paint: "_Vive __L__a __R__ésistance_"

A smile spread across Brenda's face. "Open it!" She said to the Terminator. "Someone might be inside."

The younger Terminator walked towards the craft, but stopped short. As it turned out, that someone had already yanked open the craft's mangled door and forced his way out. The middle-aged man laid face down on the ground ten feet away from the wrecked plane, holding a crowbar. He wore an odd-looking thick coat in navy green, with a patch on the back that had an embroidered design of a puppy. The coat was covered in burn marks and his face was also smeared with patches of burnt residue. He looked so dishevelled, at first they thought he was dead.

Conrad darted around, pointing his gun at the downed man. "Keep an eye on the plane!" he ordered the Terminators.

Brenda looked closer. "He's alive! Don't shoot him."

"Don't be fooled, this could be Skynet's ploy. You can never guess what that fucking computer thinks up these days," said Conrad.

"This is a human being, for Christ's sake," said Brenda.

"You don't know that."

The downed man looked up at them, his green eyes bloodshot. He tried for a second to get up, but seeing Conrad aiming the gun at him, he stayed down. He even put aside the crowbar and let go of it, despite that it would have been useless as a weapon anyway against three people armed with guns. Still, he held up his hands to show they were empty, staying still, face-down on the ground.

"Are you a Terminator?" Conrad asked.

"No," the downed man replied.

"Oh yeah?" said Conrad, not moving his gun. "Tell me then - what's the codeword?"

With his face resting against the ground, the man replied, "Come with me if you want to live."

Conrad furrowed his eyebrows. "Terminators can learn that!" He insisted. "Tell me this, then: what did Sarah Connor do to kill the first Terminator she encountered?"

"Stop it, stop it!" said Brenda. "You're being crazy!"

"No, I'm not going to stop it. You stay put!" Conrad said back at her.

Wrinkles appeared around the eyes of the downed man. Despite his circumstances, he was silently laughing at them quarrel. They were all so nervous, their faces sweating, their limbs jumpy, while the man tried hard to suppress his laughter. "She used a hydraulic press," he replied. "And it got hit with a car and a truck and a bomb and a fuel explosion...but only the press did it in."

Conrad shook his head. "Th-they could probably learn that too...you never know."

"You'll never get better," said Brenda. She walked towards the downed man, but Conrad grabbed her with his free hand and held her back.

"Just one more question." He turned back to the man. "What do you give to other people, but still try to keep?"

The man looked up at him and thought for a moment. Then he replied, "A promise."

Conrad lowered his gun, slowly and defeatedly, and put it back into its holster. He frowned. Brenda knelt down beside the man and pulled him onto his side, then tried to help him up. The man groaned and fell down again.

"He has a gunshot wound on his right leg. Numerous facial lacerations, possible internal injuries to the midriff, injury to left shoulder. Bruising to the back. All cervical, thoracic and lumbar vertebrae appear uninjured. Here, Ava, pass me the first aid kit."

Ava took an old cooler bag out of her small backpack and handed it to Brenda. Conrad was still standing where he was and didn't come to help them. He turned his attention to the aircraft wreckage, examining the ground around it and making sure their Terminators were close by.

"Oakie, double-check the survivor, will you? Make sure he's not in any immediate danger," Brenda ordered the younger Terminator.

The Terminator knelt on the ground and gently yet steadily held the downed man upright, scanning over him with his mechanical eyes. The man seemed entirely indifferent to being manhandled by a Terminator. He stared back apathetically at the Terminator's red-tinted eyes and his attention seemed to drift away, as if he was trying to will himself out of this interaction.

As they did this, the older Terminator had been checking inside the wreckage, watched by Conrad. He climbed out, pushing the jammed door aside with a clash. "All clear," he said with his thickest Austrian accent. "No weapons. No explosives. Left engine was damaged from overdrive. Cockpit is mostly destroyed. There's little fuel left, it ignited upon crash-landing."

Ava turned and grinned at him. "Thanks for the report, Grandpa. So nothing worth taking away?"

"Nothing of value remains here, and I'm not your Grandpa," the old Terminator replied.

"He is in stable enough condition to move to back to base," said Oakie, the younger Terminator, letting go of the survivor.

"Are you in any pain?" asked Brenda.

The man didn't respond. His face still bore the thousand-yard stare. Brenda repeated her question, an eyebrow raised, but again he didn't respond, so instead Brenda turned back to the younger Terminator. "Oakie, you'll have to carry him. Here, I'll take the gun."

"I understand." The young Terminator grabbed the man with one hand by the back of his collar and dragged him up. "Urgh!" the man choked.

"Not like that!" cried Brenda. "He's not luggage! Here, like this. Remember I taught you the fireman's carry? Yes, that's better. Let's bring him straight back to base." Then, looking at the low sun with faint dismay, she said, "We'll have to go to the storehouse another day."

Conrad looked on from a distance as his company turned to leave. He looked up at the wreckage, to the survivor, and down to his bag. His brows lowered and he pursed his lips, not exactly in anger, nor entirely in frustration, and also part in hesitation. He dug in his bag and found his can of pepper spray.

"Conrad!" called Ava. "What are you doing back there? Come on, let's go!" She waved to beckon him.

Conrad held the metal can tightly. Then he ran forward and caught up with the party, and pepper-sprayed the stranger square in the face.

"Ah!" his victim said in pain, covering his face with his hands.

Brenda gasped and jumped back. She coughed. Realising what happened, she looked like she was about to scream at Conrad. But she sighed, gave him a defeated look and turned around to leave.

"What? I...I just had to be sure, alright? I'm just looking out for all of us, I just had to be sure." He continued excusing himself, gesturing with his hands.

His friends were weary of all this. They followed after Brenda and the younger Terminator. The old Terminator stopped for a moment, looked at Conrad and said, "Everyone is sad because of you."

"That's not your place to say, robot," Conrad snapped back at him.

"I'm a cybernetic organism."

Brenda and Ava walked ahead with the younger Terminator, who carried the stranger. Ava looked inquisitively at him and asked, "So, what's your name?"

_Chapter Two - End_


	3. The Survivors' Shack

**Chapter Three - The Survivors' Shack**

"What? You found a _survivor_? Is he okay? Where'd you find him?" nattered the gravelly voice of an old woman.

Oakie, the younger Terminator, gently laid the strange man down onto the bunk bed. They were arguing all around him, yet the stranger himself had not said a single word on the way back to base, which they could only attribute to shell shock from crashing a plane.

"We found him in a wreck, Auntie Tess. We couldn't just leave him," said Brenda. "He clearly needed help."

"What about the storeroom?"

"Couldn't make it there. We'll go tomorrow, I promise."

"Ah, _bugger_!" Auntie Tess put her palm over her face and shook her head. "I guess we'll have to stretch the rations somehow. Did you ask him who he is? Where'd he come from?"

"We tried to on the way back, but he doesn't really answer."

"How so?" Tess said, puzzled.

She walked to the bed and looked over the man. He looked back at her. Tess was easily sixty years old, her face stern and jaded, her dark grey hair pulled into a tight bun. She wore slacks and a plain shirt that was heavily adorned in military medals, some of which looked quite out of place with each other. "Son, what's your name?" she asked.

He didn't speak.

"Maybe he just needs some time," Brenda started, coming beside Auntie Tess and gently holding her arm.

But Conrad had a different approach. "She asked your name, so answer her," he said, walking up impatiently to the stranger's bedside. "We saved your life and you're not even speaking to us!"

The man squinted at him. He shifted and sat up straight in the bed. He rubbed his red, watery eyes. "You just pepper sprayed me. That wasn't a very nice introduction either."

Ava rolled her eyes at Conrad, who looked aside sheepishly. "Yeah, about that, I'm sorry. I just had to be sure you're not a Terminator, that's all. It's nice to meet you. I'm Conrad Winston." He held out his hand. "And you are?"

The man smiled and shook Conrad's hand. "I can't tell you at the moment."

"What? Why not?" Conrad said, still holding onto the stranger's hand. His face returned to a frustrated expression.

"I just can't."

Auntie Tess had been looking them over as they talked. "Very well," she interrupted. "I trust he has his reasons. You're hurt, aren't you? Here, Oakie, come here," she said to the young Terminator as if she was speaking to a puppy. "Tend to that bullet wound on his leg."

"Remove any foreign objects. _Gently_," said Brenda from the table across the room where she had laid down their bags and a cluster of weapons taken off the Terminator's holster.

Oakie knelt beside the bed and inspected the stranger. "Negative," he said. "The bullet has already been removed and the wound is at least two months old."

"This guy's hiding something," said Conrad. He picked up the pepper spray again.

Auntie Tess slapped the spray out of his hand and onto the floor. "Leave him alone, please," she said flatly, giving him a deathly look. She picked up the spray and threw it onto the table covered in firearms, and Conrad reluctantly trailed off after her.

The stranger remained sitting on the bed, looking around at the room he had been brought into - that is, if you could call it a room. It was a ramshackle shelter, far too small for a group of four people and two Terminators, and now with him it was five people and two Terminators.

Part of the shack - the part he was in which held three beds - looked like a somewhat respectable wilderness shelter. The walls were stacked sheets of planks nailed together, the low roof some scrappy corrugated metal fixed on top of the walls. The room had three walls and no doors; the empty wall simply lead into the other section of the shack.

This section, trailing off from the bedroom of sorts, was less sturdy. The roof was a large waterproof tarp - the kind people used to put over their boats and cars back in the day when society still existed - strung over a cluster of dead tree branches. A cave made of trash, almost. The group's truck was parked outside, three feet away from the entrance.

Scattered around the room were their belongings, most of which were various weapons and odd eletronic gadgets, beat up and dusty, laid out over the floor and on the bench table. There were a few assault rifles that looked like old models, one shotgun, several sidearm handguns and three primitive-looking pipe bombs. They obviously were in desperate need of a re-supply.

Under the tarp there was a small square plastic table with fold-out camper chairs around it. Right near the entrance was a crude stove, where Auntie Tess sat preparing their dinner: all of it tinned food, yanked open with a rusty pocket knife and heated on the stove.

The stranger looked up above himself. The shack had been rigged with light bulbs and even had a small electric heater placed beside the beds. He was starting to wonder where they got electricity from in the middle of nowhere, when he saw the older T-800 unplug a wire from the wall, stick it down his shirt and plug it somewhere in his chest, and all the lights came on.

"Man, that's a good idea," the stranger muttered under his breath, stretching his hands out to the heater. There had rarely been a warm day since twenty-eight years ago, but now the year was approaching its end and the weather was especially cold.

The Terminator heard him and gave him a little smirk. "It is not usually possible. Tess remodeled me with an adapter." He pulled down his jacket collar to show the small device fixed to his chest just below the collar bone. "Under normal circumstances, my hydrogen fuel cells can stay powered for-"

"-one hundred and twenty years," the stranger finished. He smiled.

The Terminator didn't smile back. He said seriously, "But there is only one functioning cell left. Sixty years."

"I'll be a hundred and something years old by then, and hopefully, things will be a little bit better," said the stranger ruefully. He reclined in the creaky bed and tried to remember the days of his youth when California used to be warm and beautiful.

"Alright kids, dinner's done," said Auntie Tess, scooping up the nondescript blended sludge from the stove and dropping it into metal trays. At least it was hot, but that was about all that could be said for this post-apocalyptic meal she served up.

Dinner was awkward. The table was square, so the four friends sat at each side and the stranger sat on the other side of the room on the bed. Oakie the young Terminator stood guard just outside the shack, holding a huge double-barrelled shotgun, while the older T-800 stood perfectly still in the corner, faithfully acting as an electricity source to power the light bulbs and heater.

"Thank you Lord for the gifts we receive today, for keeping us out of harm's way, and for bringing us together with a new friend," said Brenda. She glanced briefly at the stranger.

"Amen," they said.

They all ate, with the stranger eating off his lap. The sludge was bad, but no-one complained, least of all the stranger - he ate like he hadn't eaten in a year.

"So, how's the work going on back here, Auntie Tess?" said Conrad, eating a spoonful of steaming slop.

"There isn't much left to do. The jammers are in working order and we still have enough ammo to last us a while. I replaced the coolant and oil in the truck. We just need gas. Make sure you get to the storeroom tomorrow."

"You can count on us," said Brenda. "How much food is there?"

"There's still enough," replied Tess. "Just focus on finding some fuel."

"So once we get gas, the plan is still to go south?" said Brenda. "What about reconnecting with The Resistance? Are we just giving up on that?"

"Brenda, I know it's disappointing for you, but it's been two months since we've had any contact with The Resistance, not since that huge disaster in SkyNet's time machine base at Brissend. Now John Connor is dead and everyone is scattered. If we want to survive then our best bet is going south, to somewhere warmer and safer."

The stranger listened intently to their conversation from a distance, though he was looking down at his plate and scraping up every last morsel of food.

"She's right," said Conrad. "We should stay moving. If SkyNet finds us then we're done. We're in no fighting shape. It's probably been rounding up all the scattered people and that's why we haven't heard from anyone. That fucking computer has gotten too damn smart lately, it's creepy."

Brenda sighed. "But if we go south...that means we're giving up. We'll be leaving everyone else behind."

"Brenda, honey, we can't save everybody," said Conrad. He gently touched her face and her short curly hair, which was like little pinwheels all around her head. "I just want the best for all of us. And at least we saved _him_." He gestured to the stranger with his spoon.

Brenda turned to the stranger. "I'm so glad we found you. I was beginning to think maybe there's no-one left around here. I'm Brenda, by the way. Brenda Winston. Conrad is my husband."

The stranger put his spork down on his tray with a clatter. "You two are husband and wife?"

"I know, right!" Ava piped up. "You would never think! That's why I say opposites attract!"

"Stop being cheeky," said Auntie Tess, giving Ava a fake slap on the head. "Here, have some more food." She scraped the remainder of her own dinner onto Ava's tray.

"What are you gonna eat, then?" said Ava.

"Don't worry, I already ate before you came back," Tess smiled.

By the time the meal was over, it was already fully dark outside and it had begun to rain. Despite the crudeness of the shack, it proved quite a cosy little home, the inside lit by the bright orange glow of light bulbs. At least here there were no skulls on the ground.

The group of four friends played a game of Rummy on the plastic dinner table. They did have a spare pack of cards, so the stranger started a game of Poker with Oakie, the younger Terminator, sitting on the floor. The older one couldn't join, for he had to stay facing the corner like a grounded child in order to keep the lights on.

"Why did they name you Oakie?" the stranger asked the Terminator as they played.

"It was Auntie Tess's idea. She said I look like a bodybuilder from a long time ago called the Austrian Oak. She liked him a lot." He stared intently at his cards. His weird fanny pack vibrated and hummed.

"I see. You have a really good poker face."

Oakie stared at him blankly. Then he laid down his cards. "I win," he said.

"That's the eleventh time you've won in a row. If you could do this in the time before Judgement Day, you'd be rich," the stranger chuckled.

The remainder of the troupe were already in bed by this point: Conrad and Brenda in one bed, Tess and Ava in the other, with the third bed left empty for the stranger. The older Terminator unplugged himself from the wall and the room went pitch black.

But the stranger couldn't sleep. Being alone with his thoughts was difficult. He laid awake in bed, looking up into the black, listening to the now heavier rain hitting the metal roof like little bullets in the night. In his lifetime he had been kept awake by gunfire on so many occasions he couldn't count them any more.

In the dark he could just about make out the tall and sturdy figures of the two Terminators standing in the doorway, perfectly still. Invulnerable guardians there just for them. He didn't know if he loved them or hated them.

Once he was sure everyone else was asleep, he got out of bed, fumbled around and found a flashlight and looked around the shack. On the benchtop he saw a few framed pictures that had escaped his attention earlier. Under the dim light, he examined them.

The first picture, taken with a selfie stick, was a group of six people. On it he recognised Auntie Tess, Ava, Conrad and Brenda, and with them was another man and woman that he did not recognise. The second picture was almost the same, but the man and woman were gone, and the troupe were much thinner, about how they looked now as he gazed back at them sleeping in their beds.

He looked at the third picture. This was a photograph of Sarah Connor in her later years, just a few months before she passed from leukemia. She appeared clearly ill, yet no less of a warrioress, clad in combat clothing with bandoliers of ammo slung over her shoulders. He smiled at the photo.

Then he realised the older Terminator was standing right beside him, silent and motionless, _staring_ at him. He jumped and dropped the flashlight.

"Holy shit!" he whispered. "Don't do that!" He picked up the flashlight from the floor, looking around to check that he hadn't woken anyone up.

The old Terminator looked at the photo of Sarah Connor and then back at the stranger. "You know this picture."

"This picture? No."

"You _took_ this picture."

The stranger faced the Terminator, staring at his unmoving eyes in the dark - eyes that emanated a faint red glow from behind the living pupils. He was speechless for a while, then he asked, "How do you know that?"

"I know you," the Terminator replied. "You are John Connor. You're not dead. Where were you in the past two months?"

_Chapter Three - End _


	4. The Little Girl In The Storehouse

**Chapter Four - The Little Girl in the Storehouse**

The storehouse they were searching for was built beside a truck stop. There were many surrounding houses which they walked past, almost enough to be a small town. Like all small towns, now it was desolate without a living soul in sight - a ghost town, serene in an unsettling manner. A large sign covered in dust and chipped paint read:

**WELCOME TO BLECATHRA**

**JESUS - LIVES - IN - OUR - HOMES**

Four of them came on this mission: Conrad, Brenda, Ava and the older Terminator. It didn't take them long to reach the storehouse, and on the way they stopped by a few abandoned homes and the desecrated gas station within the truck stop, where they found a small industrial cart to help carry items. But no gasoline.

They had high hopes when they saw the storehouse: a two-storied building bigger than they expected from looking at their map. The outside was worn like everywhere around it, but the building itself was largely intact with no fallen walls or collapsed shingles. The windows were boarded up and the front door closed. It certainly looked like something of value might still be inside.

The old T-800 raised his gun and aimed it at the rusted padlock on the door.

"No," said Conrad. "Preserve your ammo."

"Affirmative," said the Terminator. He put the gun down in the cart, walked up to the door and kicked it in with a huge crash.

Conrad cringed. "Not like that! Do you have any idea how this noise can- never mind." He sighed and pushed the cart forward through the broken door.

The troupe entered and were awed at the huge array of objects that laid before them. There was a whole warehouse of supplies, filling several shelves lined along all the walls. Someone had gone to the effort of stocking this place, yet no-one was here and everything was covered in dust and cobwebs. Had the owners fallen to some calamity or another?

"This is amazing!" said Ava, dusting off a cute pink motorcycle parked in a corner of the room.

"Be careful, Ava, check behind those shelves," said Conrad, scanning the room while holding his handgun. "Wow. Look at all this! This is so much stuff. Don't you think someone ought to be around?"

"We didn't see anybody," replied Ava, poking the wheels of her newfound bike. "They're probably dead or something. And we're alive. Alive people are more important than dead people." She giggled, barely able to contain her excitement at finding the supplies after many days of worry and anticipation.

"It doesn't seem right. Maybe we shouldn't take it," Conrad muttered. He paced around the room, checking all the corners.

"These will be useful," said Brenda, sifting through the different shelves on the other side of the room, not hearing him. She examined and then placed various objects into their cart: tools, containers, cutlery, bottles and cans of preserved food, even a roll of toilet paper. That's a luxury they'd all been missing.

"Why do we need these?" said Conrad, picking up the string of fancy lights Brenda had placed in the cart.

"Well, it's Christmas soon, isn't it, Grandpa?" said Brenda with a lighthearted chuckle.

"It is the twenty-third of December, 2032," the old Terminator replied. He grabbed and chucked a bag of salt into the cart.

"Honey, we have bigger priorities," Conrad sighed. "Let's just quickly see if there's any gasoline and get out of here. I don't trust leaving that new guy with Auntie Tess. And stop calling _it_ Grandpa. It's a machine, not a person."

Brenda rolled her eyes at Conrad as he dumped the Christmas lights out of the cart. She picked them up again and put them in her zippered sling bag, making sure he didn't see this time.

"Look what I found!" said Ava gleefully, standing beside the rickety stairs that lead up to the second floor. She held a red canister, took off the cap and smelled it, breathing in and out deeply. She grinned. "Yep, it's gas!"

"Hey, don't huff gas," said Brenda in a mock-serious manner, though she couldn't suppress her laughter. "Oh, my god. I'm so glad."

As she approached Ava, Brenda stopped and looked up. There was dust falling down from between the planks of the ceiling above them. She could also hear something - no, _someone_. Rustling and high pitched, muffled cries coming from above.

* * *

Back at the shack, Auntie Tess and John Connor had pulled the plastic table into the bedroom and sat around it, huddled in blankets. With the older Terminator gone, there was no electricity - no lights, no stove, no heater. It was freezing.

But despite he was shaking in the cold, John was also relieved that the group had decided to take the old Terminator away with them. Last night the old T-800 grilled him on where he had been and how he had survived.

John told him, again and again, "You mustn't tell them who I am, or else there will be trouble."

But the old Terminator kept asking, "Why?" until John climbed back into bed and pretended to be asleep, and only then did the old T-800 finally leave him alone. Thankfully, the old T-800 seemed to have forgotten this whole exchange by morning and didn't mention it to the others - for once, John felt quite glad that Terminators were none too talkative.

"I don't know why you won't tell us who you are," said Auntie Tess from across the table, pulling her blanket closer around herself so only her inquisitive face and a tuft of hair peeked out. "I have a good gut feeling about you, Stranger, but you're starting to mess with me."

"Say, why can't we use Oakie to power the light bulbs?" said John, changing the subject.

"Ah, you see, both his hydrogen fuel cells were damaged," said Auntie Tess. "And he's going to lock up again right about...now. _Great_."

Auntie Tess sighed as Oakie stopped moving and dropped his rifle, which fell to the ground with a thump. Oakie himself stood there upright, still as a tree.

John helped her push the shut-down Terminator back inside the shack; a rather hard task considering how much a Terminator weighed. His face had that blank expression John remembered very well ever since he and Sarah first cut open their Terminator's scalp and removed his CPU. They pushed Oakie all the way inside until he stood between the bench table and the beds.

Panting, John looked around nervously at the barren land outside the shack. They were vulnerable now. He contemplated what he could do if they were to suddenly be met with a surprise attack. After all, it was quite common for SkyNet's Terminators to attack a resting party, since Terminators had the advantage of not needing to sleep.

"Oakie's fuel cells were ruptured by a T-1000 who was chasing us and stuck its disgusting metal tentacle right through the truck door," said Tess. "I took out the cells and threw them into a lake. We all got a free shower when they exploded, and afterwards there was no more lake. But I didn't want to give up on him just because the batteries are gone."

She unzipped the oversized fanny pack Oakie wore, revealing a cluster of metal pipes and grates inside. "So I rigged him up with this little combustion engine. Took a while. He doesn't have nearly as much power as before, but at least I saved my friend."

She reached under the bed and produced a small plastic container of gasoline and used it to fill up the combustion engine.

"Don't tell the others about this, it's my secret hoard to make sure Oakie stays alive." Tess closed the lid and used a key to start the engine. Oakie twitched and slowly woke up again. He looked around the room through his red-tinted head-up display, which flashed and lagged. Lines of letters appeared as he processed them:

**... ... . ...**

**[CDS T-800 M101]****_ C.P.U. RESTARTING... ... _**

**: INCONSISTENT POWER INPUT - - - - 19% / FULL CAPACITY**

**-*/ ****_INITIALIZING BATTERY CONSERVATION MODE..._**

**-*/****_ SCANNING VICINITY..._**

**\- - - LOCATED: [TABLE] **

**\- - - LOCATED: [CHAIR] **

**\- - - LOCATED: [PENG, THERESA] STATS = 5ft 3.2in | FEMALE | 60-65yr | _549 3845092 034823454353 2155645577 756_**

**\- - - LOCATED: [CONNOR, JOHN] STATS = 6ft 0in | MALE | 45-50yr | _3498304 4323490 3239408 34534578563452 234234 256 _**

**_-*/ AMENDING IDENTITY RECORDS..._**

** As of(15/10/2032)]{ [CONNOR, JOHN] STATUS = ****d****eceased **

**\- ****f****alse **

** As of(23/12/2032)]{ [CONNOR, JOHN] STATUS =**** l****iving **

**... ... . ...**

Oakie stared at John but didn't say anything. He walked over to his dropped rifle, picked it up, and went right back to standing guard again.

Tess rummaged in their pile of belongings for something to eat, which took a while to find. She sighed at the tin can she found. "Are you hungry enough? We're short on food, this is the last one." She turned around and showed John the can: _Miami Pickled Onions. _

As they ate their breakfast of onions and nothing else, Auntie Tess said, "Say, you're old enough to remember the time before Judgement Day, aren't you? Conrad and Brenda and Ava are fine people, but they were all born after the end. It's hard to talk to them about...better times."

"I was eighteen when it happened," said John. "Living off the grid at the time, and then I fought in The Resistance after Judgement Day. Better times were short-lived."

Auntie Tess sat chewing a mouthful of onion, nodding. "It's true. You must've seen a lot of combat in The Resistance, a lot of tough times, with all those scars on your face. You look familiar. You fought under John Connor?"

"Yeah, something like that."

"I used to as well. Not directly under John Connor, but with one of the peripheral units, The Catchers. We engineered signal jammers to capture Terminators with minimal damage. Whatever SkyNet came up with, we had to find a way to jam it up." She pointed to the electronics on the benchtop. There were various different sized modems with antennae sticking out, and a small ruggedised laptop for programming.

John thought about this. He did indeed remember receiving groups of reprogrammed Terminators sent from a peripheral unit called The Catchers. Hundreds of them were delivered to the front lines over the years, and many bore The Catchers' logo - a silhouette of a carp tattooed on their arms, to show they were not dangerous. Even his favourite T-800, the one that suddenly betrayed him, came from The Catchers. Now he was looking at this old woman who sat before him in a different light.

"Did you personally reprogram them?" he asked her.

"Why, yes. There are only a few blocks in the source code that you need to change to turn a Terminator into a Guardian. Their ability as assassins to recognise an individual is immensely useful for protecting."

"Could they commit mutiny on their own?"

"No, that's preposterous," said Tess, dropping a piece of onion back into the jar. "I know my business. Unless someone else tinkers with the source code, there's no way a Guardian will change sides, not even on read-write mode. SkyNet can send infiltrators, but it can't get a hold of our own Guardians once they've been reprogrammed."

But John knew for a fact this wasn't true. He had seen it himself: the T-X corrupting the Guardian that was sent to protect him in 2003. Only, he had no proof of it. He didn't even have proof of the T-X's _existence_, which hadn't stopped troubling him since that day he was betrayed at the time machine base.

Tess paused for a moment. "If you're thinking of the incident in the time machine base at Brissend, that wasn't the Guardian - it was John Connor's fault. Good thing that arsehole is dead now."

John looked at her with a defeated expression. "You also believe it was John Connor who betrayed everyone?"

"Before contact dropped off, the primary unit radioed to us that they saw John Connor with their own eyes, sitting in the control room, commanding the Terminators and copters. Besides, who else has the power to control the Guardians without suspicion?"

"I've been thinking about that," said John. He furrowed his eyebrows, partly in vain thought and partly just because the pickled onions tasted awful.

* * *

In the storehouse, Brenda looked to the ceiling covered in cobwebs and the small clouds of dust that descended over their heads.

"There's someone up there," she said. She walked up the rickety stairs, up to the closed trapdoor where the stairs ended.

"Slow down," said Conrad, following her up.

Brenda pushed the trapdoor, warily poked her head through and looked into the second floor. This room was also full of boxes and shelves but held almost no goods. She saw a small figure crouching in the corner, in the gap between a stack of crates and the wall, huddled up, with her knees drawn up to her face. A little girl.

"Hello? Are you alright?" she said, climbing up into the second floor.

"Help me," said the little girl. Her clothes were tatty, her hair was messy and all over her face. She was shaking, sobbing. Loud, choking sobs.

"It's okay, everything's going to be alright, Sweetheart," said Brenda, crouching beside the girl and putting her arm around her, patting her back. The girl kept sobbing. Her face looked dry and no tears came out of her eyes.

Conrad emerged from below the stairs, checking their blind spots with his gun pointed. He looked down at Brenda. "Shit, is that a kid?"

"Shhh, shhh," Brenda tried to soothe the child. The girl looked aside at her and then up at Conrad.

They heard the heavy footsteps of the old Terminator walking up the stairs. He entered the second storey and met the child's eyes. He stopped short. "Get away!" he said forcefully, clicking the bolt of his rifle.

"What?" said Brenda.

The little girl placed her hand on the back of Brenda's head, and when Brenda spoke the word, as her mouth was open, a cluster of a dozen little knives of liquid metal appeared to burst through the entirety of her face. They pushed past every feature - eyes, nose, lips - as if her flesh had no weight to it. Her surprised expression broke into a mass of ragged pink skin, splattering the floor red.

The little girl held her arm there unmoving, holding up Brenda by the back of her skewered head.

The Terminator fired at the little girl, blowing apart her liquid metal facsimile of a face to reveal a robotic skeleton underneath with glowing blue eyes.

"_NO_!" Conrad screamed. He dragged Brenda away from the small Terminator, screaming her name. Screaming incoherently, in agony.

"Run!" said their old T-800, shielding them with his arm as the tiny abomination's face recovered its shape. Slowly it rose up from the floor, its arms and legs moving in freakishly unnatural ways, extending longer than they should, like distorted vines. It waded past the crates, towards the people.

The old Terminator fired again, throwing the abomination backwards, smashing the wooden crates and denting the floorboards.

Conrad dragged Brenda down the stairs, leaving a trail of blood behind them. Her limbs had gone stiff. He yelled unintelligibly at Ava, who stood in shock at what she saw. "Get out, get her out, get out of here!" he managed to say.

He ripped the canister of gasoline out of Ava's hands and in an enraged hurry he tried to pour it into the fuel tank of the motorbike Ava had found earlier. Most of it splashed outside, all over the bike. "Get on it!" he ordered Ava.

Gunshots and thuds came from above them, where their old Terminator was continuing to fight the abomination. A hail of dust and debris rained down on top of them.

"Where's the key? _Where's the key?!_" Conrad screamed.

"I don't know!" Ava screeched back.

The ceiling collapsed and down fell the old Terminator, with wounds on his face deep enough to expose metal and rips all over his clothing. He got up, tore apart the motorcycle's dashboard and twisted two wires together. The engine roared awake.

Conrad propped Brenda up on the motorcycle behind Ava. Blood ran from both the nape of her neck and all the wounds on her face, like a red spider's web over a dark fleshy mass, down her chin and soaked her khaki jacket. "Now drive!" Conrad ordered Ava. "Don't look back!"

Ava nodded and sped out of the storehouse, struggling to keep Brenda in place, and they shot down the road.

A hole blew open on the storehouse's roof and the tiny Terminator peeked from it, standing up on its legs stretched as long and thin as flag poles, looking out from the vantage point. Slowly, its little hand twisted back over itself to reveal the barrel of a cannon. It pointed its hand cannon at Ava and Brenda, riding down the road, and fired.

The shot missed and hit the ground, throwing flecks of liquid metal all around, including onto the back wheel of Ava's bike.

_Chapter Four - End_


	5. The Leader's Itinerary

**Chapter Five - The Leader's Itinerary**

Behind her, Ava could feel that Brenda had gone limp, leaning against her back, the warmth of her blood seeping into Ava's clothes. "Hold on, hold on!" she said. She turned the accelerator. They sped down the road, faster, faster.

The little piece of liquid metal that had attached itself to the motorcycle's back fender now slowly crawled across the bike as they rode, unnoticed by Ava. It crept across the engine in the wind, forward, until it rested on the side of the fuel tank covered in spilled gasoline.

Far in the distance the shack came into view, obscured by the truck parked in front of it. Ava held tightly onto the handles and prepared to turn. At this moment the piece of liquid metal fell from the side of the bike, into the spokes of the front wheel where it was caught and produced a burst of sparks that set the bike alight.

Ava screamed. The flames waved in her face. She had been driving so quickly that she could not slow down and the speed only stoked the fire. The fire covered the dashboard of the motorbike, tugged at her legs and climbed up to her hair. She felt the scalding, the stinging. She put her arm up to her face and swatted at it futilely. Then Brenda's limp body slid to one side and the bike toppled, throwing them both across the asphalt, the fallen bike skidding to a stop, still on fire.

Ava impelled herself to get up, flames leaping from her body, and staggered to the shack where she was met by an astonished Auntie Tess with a bucketful of their drinking water. Ava fell to her knees in front of Tess, gasping and unable to speak, desperately pulling at Tess's shirt. Tess poured the water over Ava, but the fire on her soaked arms and legs still burned atop the water.

"You can't put out a gasoline fire with water," said John, emerging behind her. He grabbed the edge of the shack's tarp roof and tore it down, snapping the cords tying it in place and collapsing the plank walls. He threw the tarp over Ava, pulling it tightly around her to choke out the fire.

Without being commanded to, Oakie had run out onto the road and carried Brenda back and laid her on the ground beside the scattered sticks and toppled stove. Having sat in the back seat, Brenda did not catch fire - the last silver lining.

"Oh my God!" said Tess. She stumbled to the ground beside Brenda, pushing her upright and cradling her in her arms. "Brenda! What _happened_ to you?"

"Check for chemical contamination and foreign objects in the injury site, confirm vital signs," John said to Tess while he continued to work on Ava, making sure the fire was out. He stayed calm, almost detached, to the violence and danger.

Ava looked delirious. John ran back into the messed shack, still limping from the old bullet wound, grabbed Tess's pocket knife from beneath the stove and cut off the burned and gasoline-soaked clothing Ava wore, covering her with the tarp.

"Weak pulse," said Oakie, laying his hand on Brenda's neck. He switched his hand to her nose. "No breathing."

Tess was trembling. Though she held Brenda up in her arms, she had been averting her gaze from what remained of Brenda's face. Hearing what Oakie said, she drew in a deep breath and implored herself to turn back to face Brenda. Tess opened her eyes and slowly, slowly nodded in horror, and in an attempt to steady herself.

She gently opened Brenda's mouth, pressing on the sides of her pale and torn lips, pushing on her chin caked in dried blood. All she could see was a red fleshy mess inside. Tess heaved and turned away again, holding herself up with her hand on the ground. Composing herself again, she adjusted Brenda's position so she laid flat on the ground, then said to Oakie, "We have to resuscitate her. Do you remember procedure?"

"I'm incapable of forgetting," he replied, putting his hands over each other on her chest.

Tess turned back to Brenda. She breathed in deeply, covered her mouth over Brenda's, and exhaled.

_One breath_. She could feel Brenda's body shuddering as Oakie pressed down rhythmically on her chest.

_Two breaths_. There was probably no-one better for giving accurate chest compressions than a Terminator.

_Three breaths_. Something felt not quite right. Brenda's chest didn't rise with each breath, yet Tess was sure she had a good seal despite the numerous cuts around Brenda's mouth. Where was the air going to?

_Four breaths_. Tess noticed that the back of Brenda's head was exuding blood onto the ground with each breath. And when she exhaled the fifth breath, a red bubble rose from behind Brenda and burst.

Confused, Tess felt behind her head. There she found the entrance wound - the clean vertical slit that had cut through her neck, up inside her chin and then split into so many cuts from so many little knives that tore forward through everything. The air Tess breathed had gone inside Brenda's mouth, tunneled through the wound and exited from the nape of her neck.

Tess closed her eyes. It took much willpower on her part to not throw up. With her hand shaking and wet with blood, she covered the wound on the back of Brenda's neck. _Six breaths_. Now the air made it to the intended destination and Oakie devotedly continued with the chest compressions. At this point Tess knew their efforts were reasonably futile, but it was hard not to deny that reason, at least for a moment, and hope that what they were doing was somehow useful.

As they were attempting to resuscitate Brenda, John checked over Ava. All over the front of her legs was a charred red colour. Her hair was singed on one side and the skin on her face was grazed and bloody from falling onto the asphalt road at the speed that she did. Looking up at him, she asked, "Am I going to die?"

"No, it's not that bad, you're fine," John said composedly, so much so that it sounded almost like an offhand remark.

"Is Brenda going to die?" asked Ava.

"No, Tess and Oakie are helping her. Here, drink this." He filled a cup with water and handed it to her, helping her to sit up. Though he had stayed outwardly calm the entire time, it relieved him to see her become more alert and her panting slow down as she drank. For how jaded to death he was, each Terminator attack survived was still a triumph, now that everyone lived one day at a time.

Filling the cup again, he said, "Wait here. Don't panic."

He walked onto the road towards the fiery motorcycle lying on its side. Thankfully, the fuel tank had remained closed and what fire was left was sustained only by the spilled fuel covering the outside, though at any minute the tank could have exploded from overheat. There was little doubt that approaching a motorcycle on fire was a terrible idea - or so it would be under most circumstances. But this time John could see the trip to resupply had clearly failed and they couldn't afford to spare any bit of gasoline, not even the little bit inside the flaming fuel tank.

He took off his thick longcoat. It was a gift from Kate from a long, long time ago now. It was tatty from many years of wear, and now beat-up and discoloured from the plane crash. But it was a tough garment, made to last through hell and back. And California was practically hell.

"Sorry Kate," he whispered. He flung the coat over the flaming bike and pressed on the corners. Luckily, nothing exploded.

Once the fire was out, he wheeled the bike to the side of the truck. The bike itself was hopeless: the fire had melted the wires inside the broken dashboard into a heap, the handle covers had fallen off, and exhaust pipes had come loose during the collision. But it had an almost full tank of gas inside it and the truck was perfectly fine.

In the truck he found two pairs of jumper cables. He stripped the clamps off the spare using the pocket knife and pulled out the copper wires from inside. Taking only the plastic tube, he siphoned the gasoline from the motorbike into the truck's fuel tank. It was tedious, but without a canister there was no better way. This much gas wouldn't take them far in the truck. Having lived on the edge for almost three decades though, it hardly bothered John.

Tess was still performing resuscitation on Brenda in vain. After a while Tess got up, wheezing, exhausted. Oakie was still pumping on Brenda's chest. She had not begun to breathe.

Far down the road the old T-800 appeared, with Conrad behind him, running as fast as they could towards the shack. The old T-800 reached them first. He also checked Brenda for vital signs: pulse, breathing, heartbeat.

"Brenda! Brenda, listen to me, listen to me," Conrad said as he reached the shack. He collapsed to his knees on the ground beside her. He had run so hard that his breathing sounded like retches and broke up his words.

The old T-800 stood over them gravely. "Brenda is dead," he said.

"No! She can hear me!" said Conrad. These words would have been shouted if he could, they came out as a muted whisper. He had completely lost his voice.

"Breathing and circulation are absent," the old Terminator restated, checking Brenda's arm and looking closely at her face. "Clinical death has occurred. Advanced blood loss makes revival unlikely. We must leave her."

"No, _FUCK YOU_! How _dare_ you say that!" said Conrad, his expression yelling but his voice hoarse. "You're a machine, a soulless heartless pile of metal, _you got that_? You have _me_ to thank that you even _exist_! Don't you try to command me!"

The old T-800 stopped talking, just as he was asked to. He stood there with his default stoic expression, both unimpressed and unoffended. He walked away, turning his attention to Ava while Conrad clutched Brenda, wrapping his arms around her, holding her tightly. He could feel her body had gone cold. He knew well that the Terminator was right, that once he let go it would be the last time, but he too chased away the thought. Auntie Tess sat beside them, looking horrified, trying to process everything that just transpired.

"We've got to leave this place quickly, it's no longer safe" said John to the old T-800. "Carry Ava onto the truck."

The old T-800 helped Ava up and carried her towards the truck. John got up onto the driver's seat, flipped down the sun visor and found the keys. They were always where he thought they'd be. There certainly was no time for creatively storing keys, not after the apocalypse. The Terminator placed Ava, still wrapped in the tarp, across the passenger seats.

John was kneeling backwards on the seat, fumbling in the pile of junk the group had stored behind the seat backs. He threw a bunch of torn cloths, old bandages, squashed containers and empty cardboard boxes out the door. At the bottom of it all, there was an old dusty blanket laid across the floor in the gap between the seats and the wall.

Losing no time at all, he began moving items from the wrecked shack onto the truck. The less fragile items into the cargo bed using the boxes to hold them, the more delicate ones he put inside the cabin behind the seats in the space he cleared.

Tess sat beside Conrad and Brenda. Having steadied herself somewhat and come to a certain rushed acceptance of Brenda's unpromising condition, she was both attempting to console Conrad and also asking him about all the details of what happened. Who had done this to them? What did they look like? How did they get back? What of the storehouse?

She looked up and saw John holding her electronics. "What are you doing with those?" said Tess, getting up from where she sat.

"We have to go before they get us," said John, stepping into the truck cabin and setting down her electronics inside.

"Who's 'they'?" asked Tess. "You didn't even ask who attacked them."

He stopped short as he realised she was right, he didn't ask. Asking what happened never even crossed his mind, which was entirely focused on logically solving the problems shoved in front of him. Twenty-eight years as the foremost warlord in a land carpeted with skulls had truly done a number on him; it turned him into an impossibly jaded and disciplined leader in the worst situations, but left him with so little time to think.

"It was a T-1000, right?" he said.

"Why do you say that?"

"They're not as common as the T-600 or T-800. Takes SkyNet more effort to make them and they're easier to tell apart than the old reliable endoskeletal infiltrators." He nodded his head at their old T-800. "But, considering the way it attacked Brenda, it must be one of the handful of series that are made of memetic polyalloy, that can turn their limbs into blades. I've...seen one of them kill in a similar way."

He grimaced. He still felt guilty for the death of his foster parents, even after all these years. It didn't help that right after he and Sarah destroyed the two Terminators with molten metal - the longest day of his life - the first thing he saw on television was a news broadcast containing blurred images of his foster parents' murdered bodies. The words of the uncomfortably enthusiastic news anchor were seared into his brain:

"_Janelle Voight, thirty-four, was found dead inside the home's bathroom, having suffered seven stab wounds to the neck and upper torso. The body of her husband, Todd Voight, thirty-seven, was found in the kitchen with a fatal wound that impaled the head through the mouth. The murder weapon appears to be a blade of considerable size and the murderer of great strength. The police are calling this the most bizarre crime of the century..." _

"You do have more experience engaging with them than I, since you fought on the front lines under John Connor," said Tess, interrupting his old memories. "But, this one...it was in the storehouse. My God, my God, we've been trapped."

"Not necessarily, it could be one of them that SkyNet used to cast out randomly to sweep up survivors. Either way, we have to get moving. The T-1000 is very good at tracking."

John walked back towards the shack with Tess following him. She carefully watched over how he handled the next load of her electronics.

"The odd thing is, Conrad says he saw a solid endoskeleton, like a T-800, inside the liquid alloy," said Tess. She tried to stay composed, but her arms were shaking.

John almost dropped the electronics when he heard this. "What?" he said. "An endoskeleton inside a polyalloy Terminator? Are you sure?"

"I know, maybe he didn't see right? He says it's like a T-800, but instead of a skin sheath, it has a liquid metal sheath."

John listened to this as he carried the luggage from the shack to the truck. His mind was racing, thoughts changing faster than light. This infiltrator, which he previously thought was a simple T-1000 or at worst a T-1001, now sounded exactly like the T-X. Finally, someone else had seen one - not only that, it was _right here_, close to them, in a known location. He felt no fear of it. Instead, he felt both a great relief at having been vindicated - he wasn't wrong, after all, when he said he was attacked by a time-travelling Terminator with an endoskeleton and a polyalloy sheath - and also the strongest curiosity.

It was waiting there in the storehouse. Tess was right - someone must have planted it there, this unique thing, no doubt highly difficult to produce and there for a good reason. His previous plan was to escape as far as possible from the source of danger. Now all he wanted was to find this thing and put it down.

_Chapter Five - End_


	6. Hounded By An Impostor

**Chapter Six - Hounded by an Impostor**

"You must have some record of SkyNet's different infiltrators," Tess said at the old T-800. "What is this thing that attacked you?"

"I don't know," replied the old T-800.

"You don't know?" said John Connor quietly. He looked at the old Terminator sideways as he helped to pack and pick up the last boxes of belongings to deposit into the truck's cargo bed. John had never heard a Terminator say it didn't know something. Rather, the ones he had commanded would say "I can't find record of this on my hard drive" or simply came up with a ludicrous deduction. He knew Terminators well. They never said "I don't know".

He edged away from the old T-800, glancing over at Conrad, who was still holding Brenda and talking to her in vain, crying for her to answer him. Oakie sat beside them, checking over Conrad for injuries. He was shocked but unharmed save for a few scrapes and grazes.

John didn't give it much thought before, but now it occurred to him as also quite strange that the old T-800, despite having clearly been in active service around humans for many years, reacted in such a default manner to Brenda's death. During his twenty-eight year tenure as the leader of The Resistance, John had overseen the development of sentience in many reprogrammed Terminators. Though none could match a human on an emotional level, he had also never seen a Terminator entirely fail to learn new things or develop some compassion after being reprogrammed into a Guardian. There was something deeply wrong with this old T-800.

While he ran through these thoughts and suspicions, John picked up one of the assault rifles from the group's stash that he had transported into the back of the truck. It was a tommy gun, a timeless and reliable classic, the kind that gangsters of the past used to prefer. Carrying the gun and keeping a close eye on the old T-800's whereabouts, he went to the three sitting on the ground beside what was left of the shack. He was thinking of what to say to convince Conrad to leave, but it seemed Oakie had already done the convincing for him.

"We can take Brenda with us and help her once we're on the road. We must leave now, so the other Terminator doesn't trace our whereabouts," Oakie was saying assuredly in his thick Austrian accent. "Come with me."

Begrudingly, Conrad nodded, stood up carrying Brenda and let Oakie lead him away. John sighed - there was nothing more they could do for Brenda. He looked down at the tommy gun and checked its cylinder. It was fully loaded.

Oakie brushed past John quietly. _Too_ quietly. The hum of his combustion engine had stopped...yet he was still functioning as if all was well.

_Oh, no. _

John darted around and pointed the tommy gun at Oakie. "Conrad, move!" he yelled. He fired the gun into Oakie's back, the bullet smashing a hole through his hollow body, like a stone thrown into water, except the ring of fluid that formed wasn't water but thin liquid metal.

Startled, Conrad fell, Brenda's body falling to the ground with him. John fired several more rounds into Oakie's back. Oakie slumped forward, falling face-first into the ground. His body appeared to droop down, melting into a shiny mass of liquid metal with solid parts sticking out. It lost its shape and shrank, taking shape again as an entirely different entity: a small girl.

This appearance took John by surprise. He fired more shots at the little Terminator. It steadily took the bullets while standing. None of his bullets could knock it over or throw it back; he could see, almost feel, how heavy this tiny machine was. It took steps towards Conrad, who scrambled across the ground, away from it. With each step its tiny feet sank into the earth, leaving a trail of deep footprints.

_Click_. John had emptied the entire cylinder of bullets. He ran towards the truck. "We're going to die!" he shouted at Conrad, who was still trying to drag Brenda along.

John grabbed his shirt and pulled him away from her. Looking back at the abomination that was contorting its arms into metal knives that stretched almost long enough to stab them, Conrad finally let go of Brenda and bolted towards the truck with John, leaving her body behind, the little Terminator chasing after them.

From where they stood on the truck's cargo bed, Auntie Tess and the real Oakie had witnessed it all, and began to cover them, firing two streams of bullets at the small Terminator. It walked right on, unfazed by the weak little bullets they fired from sidearm and rifle.

John jumped into the driver's seat of the truck and Conrad crammed in beside him. John stuck the key into the ignition and turned. The truck groaned, and groaned, and groaned, and didn't start. "Dammit, go!" He turned the key again.

Finally, the engine started - the most beautiful sound he had ever heard in his life. He slammed his foot down on the accelerator and heard the wheels screeching, but the truck didn't move forward.

"It's on the truck, it's on the truck!" screamed Ava from the passenger seat, where she and Conrad sat crowded.

John looked to his left at the truck door already covered in holes. The little Terminator's staring, emotionless face was pressed up against the window, not even five inches away from his eyes. Its twisted little hand gripped onto the frame of the truck between the windscreen and window, with a strength so great that it dented the metal like clay putty.

A long and thin knife cut through the door and cut past his arm.

"Argh!" John exclaimed, as much in surprise as in pain. Ava's screams from beside him drowned out his. The knife poked through the door again and again, madly, cutting him several times on the arm as he tried to accelerate and turn and escape from this hell.

The little Terminator gripped tightly onto the truck's frame while its flagpole legs were rooted deep into the ground, pinning the truck in place while the wheels spun and threw up soil and dust into the air. The truck's engine roared like a trapped beast.

In desperation John rolled down the window, removing the barrier between himself and the soulless baby face. He felt Ava shove a handgun into his other hand. He pointed the gun and blasted the little Terminator in the face, unveiling the endoskeleton and blue camera eyes beneath its polyalloy facade. Indeed, it was like a tiny T-X. The shots seemed to stun it for a second, but did nothing to move it off the truck.

Then he heard the boom of a shotgun. It almost felt like he had wished it into existence, but it was their old T-800, standing sturdily a distance away from the truck, shooting the abomination in its side. _Bang!_ The second blow deformed the shape of its torso. The old T-800 reloaded, and the third blow threw it off the side of the truck.

The tiny Terminator took no time to revv up from the ground and hurl itself at the old T-800, shooting out its liquid metal arm as a knife, aiming for the hydrogen fuel cells in his midriff. The old T-800 swiveled around so the stab landed on his side, cutting straight through his kevlar armour and sending out blood and metal sparks. He fired the shotgun again: this time the little Terminator was close enough that the shot hit it cleanly, toppling it onto its back.

"Get on!" John yelled out of the truck window. Their old T-800 jumped onto the cargo bed, helped up by the younger version of himself.

John stepped on the accelerator and the truck thundered down the road, all the items in the back clanging and banging, the wheels screeching, Auntie Tess and Oakie and the old T-800 falling down in the cargo bed. He drove as fast as the truck would go. Far behind them they could see the little Terminator getting up again, just before it disappeared from view.

* * *

It was a while before John felt confident enough to slow down a little. Now that they were away from their assailant, he didn't know where he was headed. Behind him, Tess slid open the shutter of the small window that separated the cabin from the cargo bed. She said something, but all he could hear was mumbling. Their ears were all ringing from the unplanned gunfire.

John looked over his shoulder. "What?" he shouted.

"I said we should stop somewhere. We're all dying here."

John looked around. Spotting a clearing with particularly flat and bare land and no obstacles their assailant could potentially hide behind, he pulled off the road and stopped in the middle of the clearing. Conrad and Ava both had blank thousand-yard stares on their faces shiny with sweat. They sat silently for a while inside the stopped truck, in their own worlds, each of them collecting themselves separately. Sadly, this was an experience that John had had too many times in his life so far, and which he himself quickly snapped out of. One does not get used to violence and trauma - only learn to muster enough resilience to continue on despite it.

John opened the door and got out, scoping around the truck for any signs of danger. He paid particular attention to the ground, stomping on any area that looked vaguely suspicious. Leaning on the side of the truck, he tried to keep calm and consider everything. The cold air helped somewhat, and it was amplified since his jacket was now burnt on both the outside and the inside from acting faithfully as a plane crash protector and flame retardant. Unfortunately, that meant it was no longer too faithful as a jacket.

Tess came around the side of the truck holding the jumbled first aid kit. She climbed up into the cabin. Once again, the role of medic had been thrust upon her, something she would've never dreamed of, but it was such a crucial and oft-needed role after Judgement Day.

"You got a light?" she asked Conrad.

Keeping his detached stare, he fumbled in his bag, found the lighter and passed it to Tess. Lying in the bag underneath the lighter, he noticed the bundle of Christmas lights - the ones he had told Brenda to leave behind, but here they were. He held the end of the string of lights in his hand, looking down at them. Slowly, he pulled them out from the bag and stared at them in his hands, his mind retracing. Then he got out of the truck and slammed the door behind himself, the lights waving around, filling the silence with their plastic jangle.

_Chapter Six - End_


	7. Her Presence

**Chapter Seven - Her Presence**

After using the lighter to disinfect her tweezers, Tess cleaned the scalds on Ava's legs and the grazes on her face and arms, attentively. She dipped the few odd cotton wads they had left in iodine, disinfected and bandaged the wounds, all while Ava cried.

"It's going to get better, Ava, I promise you. We'll find a way out, together," said Tess. But she herself was beginning to tear up, too. She wiped her eyes and turned around. Through the cracked window she could see John standing outside, leaning against the truck. "Stranger, your arm is bleeding," she said out the window.

John looked down at his arm. The memetic polyalloy blades had stabbed through the truck door and cut right through the cloth of his jacket sleeve, cleanly, so now his sleeve was covered in holes and his arm covered in thin but rather deep cuts. He'd completely forgotten about it in the heat of the chase. Now his jacket was messed up in _one more_ way.

Tess helped to stitch and patch him up once she was done with Ava. While she was at it, Ava reached over to the pile of their possessions thrown behind the seats and picked up the photographs at the top.

"You know, Stranger," she said. "They used to sleep there, on that blanket, before they died." She held the photo of their group smiling brightly, with all of them and the man and woman John never met. "We're going to die," she said.

"Ava," said Tess, her voice quiet and weak. "I already said we'll be alright."

"You always say that to me. Never to Conrad, never to Brenda, never to Mister Stranger there. You say that because I'm young. But I know we're going to die out here. SkyNet's gonna get us. You know that. And now we've got nothing from the storehouse, nothing to eat." She let go of the photographs and let them drop to the floor.

"Was there food in the storehouse?" asked John.

"Plenty, but it all got blown up," replied Ava. She leaned back in the seat, gingerly moving her bandaged arms and legs, trying to find a vaguely comfortable position.

"Food and what else?" said John.

"Lots of stuff. Tools, things, and that bike I rode back. Why do you care anyway? All that shit's gone."

"The bike," said John, honing in on that thought. "I was quite a motorbike fanatic before the war, after I met...well, I knew somebody who rode, and he inspired me to ride a lot when I was young. But, I don't think I ever saw a model like the one you rode back before the war."

Turning to Tess, he said, "I've found no usable supplies from the pre-war era for over ten years now, not since The Resistance's bootcamp days. There is no way, no way there could be a bike left there, a bike this recent, in pristine condition, that started up right when you needed it to. Alongside all those goods that we're sure to need. Some old tins or an industrial drum of gasoline could probably be left in a storehouse, but a whole room of almost perfect goods? You're right, Tess. Someone put it there on purpose."

"Don't tell me that," said Tess, her voice shaking. "You mean, SkyNet's closing in on us? Then it must be catching all the other scattered people too." She pulled on the needle she was using to stitch the cut on his arm.

"Ow!"

"Sorry, I'm not a doctor. I never was in the army either. I'm no good at handling a gun or bandages, so you'll have to bear with me, Stranger. They just gave us these medals to make us feel better about ourselves," Tess looked down at the cluster of mismatched army medals pinned to her shirt. She chuckled, though the stress didn't leave her face. "I got my degree in computer sciences and robotics engineering. Now look where I am!"

"Oh, you know machines? So tell me - there's one thing I don't understand," said John, laying his other hand on the dashboard, drawing in the dust as he spoke. "That Terminator that just attacked us is_ impossible_. SkyNet has never been able to engineer a Terminator smaller than a normal adult - in fact, all the older models were massive. The T-600 weighed half a ton. And just look at the T-800. The Terminator hardware can't fit into a smaller chassis. And now they suddenly made the jump to a Terminator compact enough to look like a kid?"

"It's not impossible," replied Tess. "There could be a way to engineer a Terminator engine to fit into a smaller chassis, but it's not easy with the hydraulics system in T-800's or T-850's. Whatever that thing was, I'll bet my life it's got a different internal structure than our Oakie."

"But how could SkyNet make such a huge engineering leap, with how weak it is now? It could barely cover itself. The Resistance had it by the neck, it resorted to using a time machine." John put his hand over his face, as if he had a headache.

"Maybe there's more SkyNet bases out there?" said Ava.

"Signal towers have been stripped down. Satellites are long dead. All active digital equipment has been ruggedised to defend against nanobot infiltration. I oversaw- I mean, John Connor oversaw the destruction of every SkyNet database in North America. The old military base Brissend, where it had the time machine, was the last one..." As he said this, the expression on his face changed. "Fort Spict," John whispered to himself.

What became of the platoon he sent away before the betrayal, he never found out. Captain Parker and Lieutenant Eustice had left Base Brissend before the first Terminator mutinied and shot him in the shoulder, and in the ensuing chaos he had no chance to contact them since. If the clandestine interiors of the storage buildings at Fort Spict truly did contain another SkyNet base, then it could have activities going on in there entirely under The Resistance's radar all this time, and it would be a perfect way for SkyNet to recover its strength again. John shuddered at the thought.

Then he looked aside at Tess. Something unexpected caught his eye. "You're bleeding too," he told her.

Tess wiped a smudge of blood from the corner of her mouth onto the back of her hand. "That was from Brenda," she sighed.

"No, _you're_ bleeding."

Tess sat still for a moment. She screwed her eyebrows, first in a look of confusion and then in a look of pain as a stream of bright red ran from her mouth down to her chin. She opened her mouth, cupping it with her hands and coughing.

When she removed her hands from her mouth, in the middle of her palms among the blood stains was a tiny piece of shiny liquid metal the size of a large coin, but shaped like a curved blade with sharp corners. It vibrated and twisted its shape. "What a sly bastard," she mumbled, putting down the piece of metal on the seat.

"It's tracking us," said John. Taking the tweezers Tess used to clean their wounds, he picked up the piece of metal and deposited it into a spent shotgun cartridge. Then, turning to the luggage behind the seats, he looked for and soon found the pipe bombs. Thankfully, they were intact and appeared undamaged.

"You want to blow it up?" said Tess.

John inspected the structure of the pipe bomb. "This is the kind that explodes when thrown, right?"

"Yeah, lucky you didn't shake them too much, or else we'd all be dead. It's the simplest kind to make. Fertiliser and peroxide."

"Perfect." He took the pipe bomb and the spent shell and left the truck, with Tess following behind him.

Using the pocket knife, he cut open the end of the pipe bomb, careful not to break the seal in the middle and accidentally blow himself up. He tipped the bomb and let the bleach inside flow out onto the ground.

Then he broke into the end with the fertiliser powder and poured in his gun coolant liquid, listening to the gentle sound of the mixture bubbling. He tilted the spent cartridge and dropped the piece of memetic pollyalloy into the pipe. When it made contact with the fertiliser and coolant mixture, it moved wildly, before its movements soon slowed down and stopped altogether, and it looked just like any other piece of dead cold metal.

John gave Tess a half-smile. "It's the nitrogen that does it."

"I see you paid attention in highschool chemistry class."

"I didn't go to highschool," he said snarkily. "I learned this in a junk yard in Mexico."

He turned to the truck and evenly poured the contents of the pipe onto the deformed metal frame between the window and windshield where the little Terminator had grasped onto. "Can't let any of the pollyalloy get into the truck."

As he finished pouring, they noticed that Conrad had strung the Christmas lights around the top of the truck cabin. He stood on the other side of the truck and plugged the lights into the old T-800. Now as night was falling, the lights glowed brightly, slowly flashing, growing, fading. Conrad sat down on the ground, staring into nothing. Oakie spoke to him, giving him a stiff lecture about the nature of grief and its uselessness, which he didn't hear. The old T-800 stood beside him, silently.

John and Tess exchanged a defeated look.

"It's what it is. Just leave him to himself," said Tess. "Oakie, you too. Leave Conrad alone."

"Soon we'll have to get moving again," John said. "Even after we destroyed those pieces, it will still catch up with us eventually. That's what they're made for and they're damn good at it. But for now, we need to rest, especially Ava, if we're going to last. The Terminators can stand guard."

He looked through the gaps between the cargo at the very stoic old T-800 standing on the other side of the truck, as he ushered Tess back into the cabin. Despite that the old T-800 had dutifully defended them, John still had reservations about his behaviour, and plenty of unanswered questions. He knew there was only one reliable way to find out, but one that his fellow survivors may not approve. So he waited and waited, until he was sure Tess had fallen asleep.

_Chapter Seven - End_


	8. The Odd Old Terminator

**Chapter Eight - The Odd Old Terminator**

Tess awoke at five or six o'clock in the morning. The sky was only a little brighter in the east side. It was so bitterly cold. The truck's windshield and windows were white with frost. Her hands were numb and her body ached everywhere. Ageing in such a world was not kind at all - certainly a far cry from what she thought retirement would be like back in her youth.

From where she laid among the luggage behind the seats, she peered over the head rests and saw Conrad and Ava asleep, wrapped up in every blanket and article of clothing they had. She didn't remember when Conrad came in, but it brought her much relief that he did. It was a long night, but now they finally could rest, thought Tess.

Through the frozen side windows she could see the Christmas lights were still on, strung around the outside of the truck, glowing so warmly in the cold.

Then she noticed the stranger was nowhere to be seen. Just as she noticed this, the Christmas lights suddenly went out. Her heart struck her from inside.

She slid her hand into the pocket of the coat she slept under and took out her pistol. Slowly, quietly, she climbed over the two sleepers and opened the truck door a crack. A cold draught drew into the truck, across her face, through her clothes. She shivered.

Walking out into the open, she checked around the side of the truck, aiming her pistol in the dark. All was quiet. She walked behind the truck and was startled by the three faces staring at her from the cargo bed. She almost fired her gun.

There sat John among the cargo, on one of the camper chairs, wearing Oakie's puffer jacket. On his lap was her programming laptop, which he was earnestly working on, his face lit by the dim blue glow, breath visible in the cold. On one side of him sat Oakie without his shirt. His bare skin was covered in some sort of greasy substance. On the other side sat the old T-800 with a huge hole gouged into the top of his head and his CPU port cover opened. He had the blank shut-down facial expression.

Before Tess said anything, John saw her there and said, "Hey, I need your help." He walked to the side of the cargo bed and helped her up. She didn't protest, but kept a tight grip on her pistol.

John sat back down and gestured for her to sit in the empty chair in front of his. Tess picked up their flashlight from one of the boxes and shone it at the gaping hole in the old T-800's metallic skull. She looked at it and frowned.

"I suppose you want to tell me why you're sneaking around, messing with the Guardian's CPU," she said, pointing her gun at John. "Why can't I trust you to not do unpredictable things?"

"You said that you personally reprogrammed them, right?" said John, looking down at the code on the computer screen, as if he was indifferent to being held at gunpoint. "Did you reprogram this one?"

"No, Conrad brought that one with him," she said. "Oakie is my work." She kept her gun pointed at John's face despite it seeming not to faze him.

"Did you ever look at his code? It's different than Oakie's."

Tess looked aside at Oakie, who gave her a well-rehearsed awful robotic grin. He also had a huge circular cut on his head, but the skin had been replaced.

"I can't believe you! You cut him open _too_? And what's this stuff?" She ran her hand over Oakie's arm and rubbed her fingers together, examining the slippery substance with a disgusted look.

"That's grease from the stove," said John. "Effective antifreeze. They don't feel cold, but Terminators' living tissue can get frostbitten."

"Well, if you didn't steal his jacket..." Tess started, but then she reversed from the tangent and asked, "His code is different? How?"

"Here, take a seat, let me pull this up."

Tess begrudingly sat down, laying the gun on her knee. "You learned programming in your Mexican junk yard as well?"

"Not exactly," said John, tapping on the keyboard, opening line upon line of code grouped into paths by the GUI. "The coding came later. I used to hack to steal - brute force algorithms worked a charm on ATMs back in those days. As long as nobody was hurt, I didn't care."

Tess sighed and slowly removed the catridges from her gun. "You know, despite everything, you have been vital to us. You'd make a good leader. A much better leader than John Connor."

John burst out laughing, though he tried to stay quiet, he laughed so hard he almost planted his face into the computer screen.

"What's so funny?" asked Tess. She was in the dark in more ways than one.

"Nothing," said John. "Take a look at this." He pointed to one line in the code. "See? It's on read-only mode."

"Shit, it is? How did I not notice? Then how did he learn things?"

"He didn't. His role as a guardian, exactly what he should do, exactly how much he understands, was programmed into his primary instruction data by the coder. Nothing more. He doesn't write additional instructions or receive wireless communication. That's why, compared to Oakie, he's been acting so cold and so...default."

Tess tapped on the keyboard, browsing through other sections of the code. "That's not all," she said. "There's more differences - here, here, here, and here. He's been reprogrammed with a completely different system than the one I use, the one all Catchers use, the Fisher Method. This is a different method...I've never seen one programmed like this. How in the world..."

"Wait, stop there," said John, zeroing in on one section of the code. "Independent extremity motors disabled...what are Independent Extremity Motors?"

"I think that's the rudimentary command center that helps control their limbs," said Tess. "SkyNet created it so even if the CPU-to-extremity connection is compromised, if the limbs are not damaged they can still communicate wirelessly with the CPU. The limbs work on their own. Kind of like a skink and its tail."

John listened to her explanation and he thought, he remembered hearing of this somewhere before.

He recalled the contents of the tapes Sarah recorded for him before he was even born, the precious tapes he kept hidden during his foster care years at the Voights' house, by breaking a hole into his bedroom wall and depositing them behind the plaster board. In those years he spent hours upon hours in the dead of night staring at the white ceiling, listening to those tapes over and over again, sometimes just to hear his mother's voice, but regardless he had memorised them all.

Of course, he put in particular effort to remember the things she spoke about Judgement Day, information about weapons and combat, and every detail about Kyle Reese. But another part of those recordings, spoken with her voice shaking, he remembered most deeply:

"_We blew it up, but it still came after me, it had no legs anymore, but it still wouldn't stop...it climbed over your father to get to me. Even the legs...it fell apart in front of me, but it was still moving. It's hell, torture, torment, pain, like nothing else...just to kill this thing._"

With Sarah's voice ringing in his mind, John turned to the shut-down old T-800 sitting beside him, inspecting the worn and dirty bandages that covered the arms. He grabbed the pocket knife and cut off the bandages and let them drop to the floor. Underneath was a collection of old war wounds in the process of healing. But there was also another wound - no, two wounds, almost a mirror image of each other - cut into both his arms: two neat incisions on the side of the biceps, stitched up.

Using the knife, John unpicked the stitches on the T-800's right arm while Tess watched with a look of disapproval, though she couldn't hide that she, too, was curious. He pulled at the cut and it came apart, streams of blood running down the Terminator's arm. The cut was deep enough to expose the metal endoskeleton and hydraulics that laid beneath. There, set neatly into a tiny armoured compartment in the Terminator's shoulder joint, was the component he was looking for, which had evidently already been investigated by whoever made the cut.

"The extremities can work independently of the CPU itself," said John. He bolted upright and yelled, "I get it now!"

"I know that already," said Tess. "And the Fisher method intended to preserve that, to make the Terminators harder to kill. But whatever method this is, it has the IEMs switched off."

"Tess, who developed the Fisher method?" said John, grabbing Tess's shoulders.

"One of the founders of the Catchers group," replied Tess, pulling away. "Her name was Blythe. She went by Blythe Miles, I think. Used to be from a family of devs involved in Cyberdyne, before Judgement Day came about. She was always so collected, like she knew what she was doing, so we leaned on her."

"What else can you tell me about Blythe?"

"I didn't know her well. She was so very young for her talent at the time...but now she'll be about your age, or maybe a little younger. All I know is that she's native to Los Angeles, and she often mentioned her father who passed away quite tragically when she was only five."

"Blythe..." muttered John to himself, standing up and putting down the laptop, walking to the tiny clearing on the cargo bed under the lightening sky. "Blythe, I've heard that name..."

_Blythe! Come here! Get in here! _

The frantic screams of a woman cut through the older parts of his memory, buried beneath the years of recollections of gunfire and fields of skeletons. The voice of the woman, his own panting breath, the shadow of his mother's back walking steadily through a clear white room.

"Blythe Miles...Miles Dyson...Blythe Dyson," he said. A look of surprise, and then elation, washed over his face along with the cold of the air. There was his answer - it was just one possible answer, but it was _his_ answer. Then his train of thought was suddenly broken.

"Hey!" a voice called. Conrad leaped up onto the cargo bed from the ground. "The fuck are you doing to my Terminator?"

Conrad grabbed the laptop, shut down the coding app and removed the T-800 CPU from the drive. He replaced it in the old Terminator's head and closed the port cover, struggling to secure the screws using the pocket knife. Finally, he slapped the skin back onto the Terminator's skull.

John stood with his back to Conrad's flustered commotion. He took off the puffer jacket and handed it back to Oakie, as Conrad continued to rattle about behind him.

"Thank you very much," said Oakie in his robotic way devoid of any meaning. He put on his jacket, noticeably quietening the rumble of his combustion engine.

"I have to go back," said John softly, to no-one in particular, though he said it in Oakie's direction.

Conrad stood anxiously in front of the old T-800 as it slowly started up again. He noticed the blood on the floor, and then the source: the gaping wound on the Terminator's right arm. Shaking with fury at the sight of this damage, Conrad snatched the pistol from Tess and loaded in the cartridges. He ran to John, grabbed him by the collar and pressed the gun against the side of his head.

"Who are you? Why are you doing this? _Why?_" Conrad yelled in John's face. His heavy breaths of anger and frustration formed momentary clouds in the cold air.

"Conrad," said Auntie Tess. "What would you accomplish by shooting him? None of us can live through any more death and pain...put the gun down." She sighed and buried her face in her hands.

Conrad shook his head. But he took a moment and looked aside at Tess, and when he saw how defeated and sorrowful she was, his expression weakened. Ever so slowly, he lowered the gun down to his side and let go of John's shirt.

No sooner had Conrad let go of his shirt than John asked, "Did you use a different method than Fisher for reprogramming your old Terminator?"

When he heard this, Conrad lit with rage again. He raised his gun and cracked John across the head with it. Tess flinched. The blow almost threw John off the truck, but he quickly regained his balance and recovered his stance. Standing still, John calmly looked Conrad in the eye as a line of blood descended down the side of his face.

"Did you?" he asked again. He didn't move to fight back or defend himself. He only continued to stare Conrad in the eye, his resolve to find an answer unwavering.

Conrad lifted the gun again, as if he was about to pistol whip John a second time. John stood there collectedly, looking at him - looking right through him, rather - waiting for an answer. Finally, Conrad threw the gun to the floor with a clatter. He turned and paced around the tiny space on the cargo bed with his hands raised to his head, pulling at his own hair, grating his teeth.

"You're damn right I did!" he shouted. "I didn't trust that Blythe Miles woman! She talked like she knew everything. People like her, people like_ you_, sneaking around with your own little plans held over our heads, manipulating us, who knows what the fuck you're up to? I just wanted us to be safe! _I'm_ supposed to tell the truth? I don't even know who you are!"

The old T-800, who had woken up and been looking at all of them silently, now spoke up. He said candidly, "He's John Connor."

"Yes, he's John Connor," Oakie parroted.

Everyone stopped in place, including Ava in the front of the truck, who had opened the hatch to see them. They all stared agape at John, waiting for an explanation. John took a moment to gather his thoughts, sweeping back his dark hair and wiping away the trail of blood on his face. He looked tired and downtrodden.

"Yes, I'm John Connor alright. Leader of The Resistance - not much to look at, I know. After what happened at the base, I was afraid to let you know. It was dishonest...cowardly, to be so afraid of your judgement. Now that you know, you understand why I must go back."

Tess spoke in a whisper. "But..how did you survive?"

_Chapter Eight - End _


	9. What Happened To John Connor?

**Chapter Nine - What Happened to John Connor? **

John looked up at the Terminator from where he laid on the muddy ground.

The Terminator's muscular silhouette stood against the clouded sky, between the high grey walls of the hangars. Now he was alone with his mark, the two of them face to face, eyes to eyes, inside this narrow alley. He had the shotgun pointed at John. The shadows of bicopters and tricopters flew in the distance, shooting and killing the other Resistance members.

In that brief time they faced each other, John remembered the many missions he had done with this Terminator, who was always his rock, his confidant, the one person he trusted the most. The Terminator's quiet confidence and coolness John had learned from every day. The Terminator, after all, was the closest thing to a father he ever had.

And now that he lay on the ground with the mutinied Terminator looming over him, John was helpless. Gone was the strong and brave leader. The sight of the Terminator, with his gun pointed, reduced John back to the scared child running for his life through the galleria hallway. He closed his eyes and waited for the sound of gunfire.

It didn't come. With the shotgun still aimed at John, the Terminator said, "Get up."

John looked at him, astonished. He tried to lift himself from the ground, but with a fresh gunshot wound in his leg, it was a difficult command to follow. Seeing this, the Terminator walked up to him, holding the shotgun in one hand, and with the other hand he grabbed the back of John's armoured vest and roughly pulled him to his feet.

Then the Terminator walked back through the dusty land between the hangars, back towards the time machine hall, dragging John along by his clothes while he stumbled and tried to struggle free, to no avail. The massacre by the bicopters and tricopters was happening all around them, but the Terminator entirely ignored it, hauling John back into the hall.

The ceiling lights of the hall had gone out and the air was filled with the smoke of gunfire and the sickening smell of blood and viscera. The circular arches of the time machine emitted their neon glow through the thick air. The T-800 walked on, dragging John with him, walking over the dead bodies of his friends who had fallen to the numerous other Terminators that betrayed them.

Now those traitors stood still all around the hall, over the pools of blood and the bodies of their victims, holding their guns at attention. They didn't react to the T-800 dragging John through the hall, neither to help him nor to attack him. In the struggle, John caught a few glimpses of their faces, which looked blank and unaffected.

"What happened to you?" he said, his voice quivering. "You've been corrupted!"

The T-800 ignored him, continuing to haul him forward by his vest.

"Remember your primary mission? It's to protect me! To protect us! That's what you were programmed to do!" pleaded John. "Remember it!"

As he was forced through the hall, John continued attempting to reason with the Terminator. But this time was unlike the occasion twenty-eight years before, where he had convinced his Terminator to shut down when it was corrupted by the nanotechnology of the T-X; the only time he ever saw a Terminator successfully be bargained with.

This time, the Terminator that was now dragging him by his vest showed no sign of any struggle with an outside force. No speaking, no conflicted expression on its face. In fact, it didn't seem logically present at all, or to hear anything John said. It pressed on, every bit like the machine SkyNet made it to be, that felt no pity, no remorse, no fear. John would later learn why this was, but in the moment, surrendered to fear and shaken by two bullet wounds, he was entirely bewildered.

The Terminator took him all the way down to the back of the hall and started walking up the shaky scaffolding stairs that lead up to the mezzanine above them, which ran all around the walls. He dragged John behind him like a sack of luggage, the sound of his boots on the metal stairs ringing through the hall with each step.

At the top of the stairs the Terminator kicked down the door and walked along the empty mezzanine hallway. The time machine on the floor below them emitted its dim light, framing the Terminator's face, defining the unmoving features with blue crescents on one side while the rest was in the dark. It cast his shadow on the wall as he walked, silently, his footsteps echoing.

He reached the door at the end of the hallway, flung it open and hurled John through it, sending him sliding across the floor. Then he shut the door in front of himself, leaving John in the room alone.

John staggered up and tried to open the door, but the Terminator had in some way bolted it from outside and no matter how John twisted the handle and pushed, it would not budge. Through the frosted glass panel on the door he could see the Terminator's shadow moving outside. It swayed and then disappeared. He had been locked in here and left.

After a few more futile attempts to push open the door, the futility of which was amplified by his gunshot wounds that bled him into a weakened daze, John looked around the room he was trapped in, which was almost completely dark. The only light was the wavering blue glow of the time machine that seeped in through the glass panel.

He scrabbled around the walls to locate the light switch, found it and flipped it, but nothing happened. The power was out. The sound of distant gunshots outside was beginning to wane.

Feeling his way around the dark room some more, John realised he had been locked into the base's main control room, with its several huge wiry modems lining one side of the room and an operating console with numerous big screens mounted on the wall. Everything was shut down and pitch black. Hopeless.

He tried the door again and when that again failed, he searched all around the room for another possible way out. First, he turned to the windows facing the mezzanine hallway, which had all been boarded up with metal sheets, letting no light in. He picked up the chair at the console and tried to knock the windows down with it, but all he accomplished was making a great deal of noise and further exhausting his injured self.

After a while of ramming the window boards to no avail, he threw the chair in frustration and fell to his hands and knees, panting. Now he was at the mercy of his captors and there was nothing he could do, everything he did was worthless. This inability to do anything useful distressed him more than any gunshots could.

He crawled across the floor, looking for something to pull himself up by, but instead his hands came upon a discovery low on the wall opposite to the windows, beneath the control table. He felt rows of metal grates with a square frame around them, mounted to the wall - an air vent.

This discovery was a straw of hope. John felt around the grates, locating the tiny metal screws on the corners of the frame. Eight of them.

His handgun was lost, but he still had the leather holster with a metal buckle. He grabbed the buckle and tore it away from the holster. Pressing the sharp corner of the buckle firmly into the screws on the vent, feeling its location with his thumb and finger in the dark, he unscrewed each of them, painstakingly, for the makeshift screwdriver didn't fit well and slipped again and again. But he kept calm and finally the last screw fell. The soft clink of it hitting the floor brought him such a feeling of relief. He held the grates and pulled, and the air vent cover fell to the floor with a clash.

He stretched his hand out and felt inside the dusty vent. It was just barely big enough for a man of his size to climb through, and that was being generous. The passage extended a short distance into the wall and then took a sharp downward turn into a vertical descent. Without a light he had no way of telling how far this fall would be, or what obstacles might have lain along it. But with the door and windows bolted, he had little choice but to give this vent a try.

Just as he began to crawl into the narrow space, the lights on the ceiling suddenly flickered and turned on, illuminating the control room in blazing white light. John backed out of the vent, squinting and covering his eyes from the brightness. He steadied himself, processing the sudden change of fate, seemingly for the better. He picked up the collapsed chair, pulled it upright and sat in front of the operating console.

The screens flashed. One by one they came on and the static cleared to show surveillance footage of different areas around the base - the hall covered in carnage, several points in the hallways, the field of war outside, and the inside of the hangars where many of his people were still alive and taking cover against the traitor Terminators.

John grabbed the wired transceiver on the operating console, tuning the dials to the frequency that called The Resistance's common channel. He spoke hastily: "This is John Connor. Codeword: revelation. All standing, come in, come in."

Crackling over the radio, there came a reply, and then another and then more:

"_Read you_."

"_Read you, Commander. Stand by, under fire._"

"_Captain Tim calling in. Read you loud and clear_."

Wearing a relieved smile on his face shiny with cold sweat, John worked the buttons on the operating console, looking for some way to lock down the hall and foyers. He continued to talk into the transceiver, "All standing, take cover. Do not attempt retaliation. Prepare to evacuate, I repeat, prepare to evacuate. Over."

"_Roger that, Sir. Stand ground, prepare to evacuate. Wilco._"

Then, a different voice came buzzing through. "_Radio check. Kate Brewster Connor coming in. John?_"

"Kate?" said John, holding the transceiver tightly. "Do you read me?"

"_Affirmative, but signal is weak,_" Kate's voice crackled through the radio. "_Switch to channel six._"

John hurriedly switched to channel six. "Kate, are you alright?" he said.

"_I'm alright,_" her voice came back, much clearer this time. "_We're under siege, the Terminators have turned on us. My transceiver is not working on the common channel, use yours to call everyone to the loading bay. There are obstacles here, tactical advantage. There are three active tricopters in the opposite hangar to use for evacuation. Over._"

This was such a great turn of luck, John could hardly believe it. He switched back to the common channel and immediately commanded everyone to head towards the loading bay, and watched on the security footage as they did this one by one, sidling by the sides of the hangars, covering their blind spots.

"_John. Have you lost control of all the Terminators?_" asked Kate through the radio.

"All of them. Objective now is to evacuate everyone. Do not mind me, do you understand? Get yourself and everyone else out. Over."

"_I copy. Have you tried giving commands to the Terminators to shut down? Over._"

"It's useless," said John.

But looking through his monitor at all the Terminators standing still in the hall below, now also whitely lit again, John couldn't help but think to try again, one last time, even if it was certainly futile. So he spoke into the transceiver, "La Résistance, paging all T-700, T-800, T-850, T-900 Guardians. Prepare to receive command."

And he looked, shocked, at the monitor as the figures moved - the figures of the Terminators that stood over the slaughtered bodies of their former masters, the Terminators that had been bloody killing machines a moment before. Just as abruptly and perplexingly, they turned attentive to John again. Now they stood at attention and one by one the many voices replied, "_Cyberdyne Systems Terminator, receiving._"

"_It worked!_" said Kate through the radio. "_John, order them out of the hall. They must not damage the time machine, we still need to send the Terminator to save you in 2003. Over._"

"All Guardians, advance. Exit the hall," said John, heeding Kate's advice and seeing on the monitor that his command was adhered to. The concord of Terminators' marching footsteps echoed as they slowly marched out of the hall and into the field, closer to where the survivors were.

"_We're all at the loading bay. Now is the perfect time. Tell everyone to go over to the hangar._"

"Calling all standing," said John. "Speed west to hangar number 07, I repeat, 07." Then, turning his radio back to channel six, he asked Kate, "Does Buddy have all needed equipment for evacuation?"

"_Affirmative. He has everything he needs._"

When he heard this, John paused. He had been working furiously at the console, but he stopped dead still when she said this. With a confused look on his face, he asked, "...everything he needs?"

"_His guns, armour. Buddy is alive and well, uninjured. Over._"

The transceiver slipped from John's hand and landed on the top of the console with a bang.

He knew well, and Kate knew well, that Buddy wasn't a guy. They knew everyone in their platoon by name and there was no-one they called Buddy, and there never was anyone. Buddy was the longtime nickname they had given their most reliable tricopter plane, which had gone through so many breaks and fixes and continued to serve them, like an old friend. Kate knew that when John referred to Buddy, he was never talking about a person.

So when he heard her reply, John realised that the person talking to him on the radio who had steered him to make all these commands, was not Kate.

_Chapter Nine - End_


	10. Fallen To The Trap

**Chapter Ten - Fallen To The Trap**

It took a moment for John to collect himself after this revelation that brought with it a million questions and fears, though fear was something that was with him for so long, by this point staying calm in the face of unpleasant surprises was second nature to him. He leaned his head on one hand, resting by his elbow on the table, and with his other hand he drummed his fingers on the console beside all the buttons he had been working on. After some consideration, he picked up the transceiver from the table.

"Kate, I will call them to evacuate shortly. Stay where you are. Over," he said to the imposter on the other end of channel six.

The imposter did not reply. All he heard through channel six was the sound of radio static.

"Kate, do you read me?"

Again, silence. The imposter no longer bothered to spend time toying with him, and soon he saw why: her mission was already accomplished.

Bright and clear on the monitor, he could see the remainder of his people walking fast across the empty field outside, entirely out of cover, towards the hangars on the other side. It was just as he had ordered them to do, having been persuaded by the imposter. And quickly marching towards them from the open doors of the time machine hall was the group of Terminators, also commanded by him, just as the imposter wanted. The group of people and the group of Terminators met at the middle of the empty field.

Immediately, the Terminators opened fire on the survivors, scattering them like scared ants on the monitor. A dozen voices screamed through the common channel, blending into each other and into the sound of gunshots.

"_We're under fire! We're under fire! Run! Retreat!_"

"_Mayday, Mayday! Help! Withdraw!"_

_"Help! Request Assistance! Anyone!" _

"_Commander Connor! Why are you doing this to us?_"

"This is not my order! No!" said John. He leapt from his chair, his hands flailing and his eyes darting around in panic. He yelled every single command he could think of to the Terminators - to shut down, to turn back, to abort all termination missions. But nothing quenched the loud sounds of gunshots he could hear all around him, through the radio and through the building's echoing walls.

He jammed every single button on the console, yet nothing of value happened. He called to his people, but all he heard in return were more incoherent screams of agony. He threw the transceiver across the room where it smashed into the monitors. He kicked the door, but it wouldn't budge.

Then the lights suddenly snapped off again, plunging the room into total darkness.

Now, John felt a looming dread as he realised everything that just transpired in the past hour, which so quickly brought him from the highest height where he had almost accomplished the goal he set out to do since birth, down to the present depth with almost all his friends probably dead, was a ploy. Everything that happened - the betrayal of the Terminators, the electricity outage, Kate's imposter...it all happened so deliberately. _But how? But whom?_ He didn't understand. They had already disabled all of SkyNet's terminals in the base. John swept back his wet hair, breathing heavily.

Then, in the dark, he heard footsteps walking along the mezzanine hallway outside the control room. Fast, light footsteps, drawing closer. With each closer step, John's feeling of dread grew. He heard the noise stop outside the door, and then the sound of someone turning the doorknob and the clang of the bolt being disengaged.

A bead of sweat fell from his brow. He ran to the opened air vent, pulled himself along in the dark and climbed into it. Behind him, he could hear the door opening. From the corner of his eye he saw a man, tall and thin and clad in a startling white coat, walk into the room and look down at him through green-tinted night vision goggles. The shadowy man's hand moved to his side and took out something from his coat pocket.

John hurled himself into the air vent. He crawled around the corner and fell down into the vertical portion, sliding along the duct. He heard the man in the room say something, but it was unintelligible under the clanging and banging he made against the metal walls of the ducts. Then the man fired a few shots into the duct, none of which hit John, but the sound was defeaning. John propelled himself forward, scrambling towards the bottom of the vertical duct. The man didn't follow.

At the bottom of the fall, the ducts widened into a conjuction, with several forked passageways leading into other different ducts. All was pitch black. Following the largest one, feeling along the walls, John could tell that he was descending lower into the huge building complex that was SkyNet's largest base. Base Brissend truly was a monster of a fortified building, hence SkyNet's decision to house its most crucial creation - the time machine - here. With each step the duct became wider and wider.

Eventually, the duct ended in a massive vertically-mounted ventilation fan twice his height, between the blades of which he could see the light of the world outside and the trodden skulls on the ground. The fan was stopped, just as all the other power in the building was out. Ironically, the tactic of blacking out the building employed by his pursuer to trap him now allowed him a chance to escape.

With a few well-aimed kicks to the center of the blade, he managed to dent one of them just enough to crawl through the widened gap between the blades, with the sides of the blades scraping against him. He owed his life on many occasions to kevlar, but on this occasion he also had it to owe for allowing him to keep all his skin intact.

When he emerged outside, it was quiet. All the gunshots had stopped. _Everyone's dead_, he thought. He rubbed his hands across his face and eyes. He felt like he was dreaming, a nightmare within a waking nightmare. He rarely had bad dreams; most of his dreams were pleasant, either of the world before Judgement Day or of the better life he was sure would come again, or at least he was sure an hour ago.

He stayed there in front of the huge stopped fan, exhausted, when it started up, blasting him with a gale of air. He turned around and looked into the fast-rotating metal blades of the fan, and shuddered. If he had been even a minute later in crawling out then no amount of kevlar would have saved him. Whoever that green-goggled man in the control room was, he was completely ruthless, concerned with more than just efficient self-preservation like SkyNet was. He seemed rather keen on savagely murdering himself and all the resisters.

With what strength he had left John walked forward, away from the building complex, skulls crunching beneath his shoes. He went to take cover behind a tricopter plane wreckage, but as he ducked behind it he found none other than his wife Kate sitting there, holding a long rifle. He gasped and drew back, running, stumbling, scurrying away from her as fast as he could.

"John!" she cried as he ran. "John, stop! It's me! It's really me!"

He wouldn't stop. He fled from her because as far as he knew, his life depended on it. Looking back, he saw her aim the rifle at him. She fired and he felt the impact of the gunshots, many of them, upon his back, like solid punches, throwing him down onto the ground. He felt wetness on his arms where the shots had hit him.

Kate ran towards John and knelt down beside him. "I'm Kate! Not a Terminator!"

John sat up, disoriented, and looked at her and then at his arms, which were covered in yellow paint and so was his vest. He realised she had shot him with a paintball gun, just like she did on the first night they met. Over the years she had gradually adopted his sense of pacifism - though she rarely praised him for it, she kept many non-leathal weapons for handling dissent among their people. The yellow paintball gun became her favourite. Yes, this was Kate.

"You're alright, thank God, I heard you coming and I thought one of them was closing in on me," said Kate, helping John up, leading him with her to duck behind the wreckage once more. "They got us again, they got us good this time." Kate rubbed her eyes, sighing. "What did we do wrong?"

"I don't know," was all John could manage. This was too massive of a mistake. His mind was blank.

"Tim said he'd come for us. I'm out of ammo, John."

"If it's Tim, then I trust he'll be back for us soon."

They sat there behind the wreckage, waiting. They were unarmed. Every second of staying there could be the death of them. Filling the air was the threatening rumble of the base's systems. Once again it was the undead fortress run by machines, the roar of its massive ventilation fans and the hum of the fluorescent lights inside distant yet loud. Blended into the noise were the unmistakable footsteps of Terminators, marching soullessly atop old skeletons, looking for the two marks they missed.

One pair of footsteps sounded particularly close. A shotgun fired and the round blew into the wreckage behind them, expelling broken metal and glass shards all over them both. They heard the gun cocking and then more blasts to the top section of the wrecked tricopter's canopy, right into the cockpit. These shots would have done them in had they been hiding inside the wreckage rather than behind it.

The attacking Terminator then lolled briefly where he stood, reloading his gun. Taking this chance, Kate and John got up and ran for their lives. But the bullet wound to his right leg caught up with John and he fell. As he tried to clamber up from the ground, John heard their attacker approaching and looked over his shoulder to see. From around the wreckage emerged none other than the one who had shot him twice and then hauled him into the control room - his trusty Terminator, the first one to betray him.

John rolled over as the Terminator fired its shotgun, blowing up the ground where he was a second before.

"Look here, look here!" Kate yelled with her paintball gun pointed at the Terminator, knowing they usually reacted to threat.

But this Terminator kept his attention wholly on John. He threw aside his depleted shotgun and walked towards John, now empty-handed yet no less murderous. John crawled into the tricopter wreckage as the Terminator loomed at him. He swung the door of the cabin shut in the Terminator's face. The swinging door hanging by its last hinge managed to stall his pursuer for a moment.

In this time, Kate was examining the wreckage and noticed the shots previously fired by the Terminator had damaged one side of the canopy so badly that the rotor mast was crushed and one of the tricopter's blades was dangling, held in place by only a few wires that remained intact. Here she saw her opportunity.

She ran up to the wreckage, jumped onto the side and pulled herself up by the jagged edges of broken steel plates, up onto the mangled canopy. Through the holes she could see John inside, bracing himself against the wall opposite to the door, as the Terminator grabbed the corner of the door and violently tore it off the hinge.

Holding the barrel, Kate rammed the stock of her paintball gun into the crushed rotor mast. The flimsy gun snapped in two, but her blow was enough to break the last wires that tied the rotor blades to the body of the wreckage. The blade fell onto the canopy with a crash, slid down and took the pursuing Terminator by surprise. One end of the blade hit him before he could react to push back with his arms. It cut a gash across his face and exposed the red light in one eye. The Terminator was knocked to the ground.

"Come on!" shouted Kate from on top of the cabin. She reached down through the holed canopy and helped John out of the wreckage.

The Terminator shoved away the rotor blade and stood up from the ground, revved to continue his rampage once more. As he did so, there came the sound of a rumbling car engine and turning wheels against the earth and crunching bones and rubble. An armoured vehicle - the kind they salvaged from old military storage sites - sped out from over the hill. It crashed into the Terminator with a loud metallic thud, throwing him aside back into the dirt, and barely missed John and Kate before it screeched to an abrupt halt.

The air was choked up with dust and the smell of gunpowder. The car door opened and out jumped Tim, his bright ginger hair flowing, though he had long since cut off the mullet of his youth.

_Chapter Ten - End_


	11. The Hero We Need But Don't Deserve

**Chapter Eleven - The Hero We Need But Don't Deserve**

Tim fired a bulky taser gun at the downed Terminator he had just rammed with his vehicle. The probes released from the gun made bright blue sparks against the Terminator's back. Its power was such that an electric buzzing could be heard and a burnt scent filled the air. Any living person would be killed by a weapon like this. Once hit, the Terminator stopped moving and the red light in his eye dimmed down. Tim knew his business well.

In the distance, many mutinied Terminators had heard the noise and were coming for them like a horde of robotic zombies walking across the skulls and bones of the landscape.

"John, Kate! Quick, get in the car!" Tim deactivated the stun gun and pulled the probes out of the Terminator's torso. He then ran to the car, followed by Kate, with John behind them.

As John ran past the deactivated Terminator lying on the ground, he glanced down at the Terminator's face: his bloodied eye and cut-open cheek, the vague wrinkles between his brows and his slightly greying hairline. This traitor was one of his older Terminators, but even more than that, his injured face reminded John of something else.

Though all Model 101 T800s were created from the same mould, every Terminator developed their own visual perks over time. When he needed to, John could always tell them apart.

And in this instant when he looked down at the face of this Terminator lying beside him, he was absolutely sure it was the same face as the one he saw break out of a helicopter and save his and Kate's life at Crystal Peak twenty-eight years before - in the Terminator's own words, he was the one who would kill John Connor, the one who would then be sent back in time by Kate Brewster to save her own life before Judgement Day. It was something John could never forget, not even almost three decades later.

"Tim, help me with this," John said, grabbing the Terminator's arms and painstakingly dragging him across the ground towards the car.

Tim was surprised for a second, and fearful as he looked out at all the Terminators making their way towards them. But since they were kids, he had never questioned John Connor's better judgment. He quickly ran to help, pulling on the deactivated Terminator's legs as John pushed from the other side. The loose gravel and debris on the ground made him somewhat easier to drag, but still nigh impossible considering the Terminator's weight. Finally, they got him into the armoured car, laying him down across the floor between the seats.

John and Tim then scrambled in, slamming the doors, just in time. Bullets fired by the approaching Terminators banged on the outside of the armoured car. Cracks appeared in the small windows. Tim drove forward, turned the car around and sped away, feeling the impacts as they hit several Terminators. One jumped onto the back of the car and clinged until Tim slammed the brake, throwing it off before taking off again, quickly, away from Base Brissend, away from the danger of all their pursuers, and away from the only time machine.

"That was close, thank goodness you're both alive and alright," said Tim, loosening his bulletproof vest as he drove on. "What do we do now, where do we go?"

"We have to contact the alliance. We need their help and reinforcements fast, we've been devastated," said John. He knelt by his good leg on the seat, peering out from the tiny high windows.

"I tried to get them online, but I'm getting no reply. Just static. That's weird. Our short-distance radios were all working fine when you were in the control room."

"About that," started John. "In the control room...there was someone there, someone who could imitate voices. They were manipulating."

"But it was you who gave the commands for everyone to go to hangar seven, and then you ordered the Terminators out," said Tim. "You said those commands, didn't you?"

"Yes. But someone was speaking on the radio in Kate's voice, telling me you were prepared to evacuate. I...I should have known better. I really thought SkyNet was down. I was too sure..."

Tim turned around, looking at John with a side glance. His expression was calm and collected, yet he had an unmistakable look of disappointment about him. "I thought there had to be something else going on. But after you gave those commands, the Terminators shot everyone and...almost everyone is dead now."

Tim didn't seem sad or angry - there was no room for those feelings anymore, not after years of becoming gradually more jaded to daily suffering and death. Tim looked tired. He undid the last strap on his bulletproof vest and took it off, laying it on the seat beside him. The outside of it was covered in bullet holes and blood that wasn't his.

"You have to trust me, Tim. I wouldn't have given those commands if I thought any other way was possible," John grimaced, brushing back his hair frustratedly with his hand.

"Of course I trust you. I've always trusted you and I'll always trust you," said Tim softly. "I don't believe you'd ever try to hurt anyone. Not for life."

"Thank you, Tim."

John and Kate sat side by side on the beat-up seats, leaning against each other. This car was so very old, one of a dwindling number of military vehicles from the pre-war era that The Resistance owned, which could no longer be manufactured now that most factories were destroyed and so little skilled workforce was left alive after twenty-eight years of SkyNet's round-ups and terminations. Even fewer had opportunities to put their skills to use, being constantly on the edge of demise. The exception, of course, being the catchers and reprogrammers of Terminators.

"Well, I can't seem to get the alliance online," said Tim. "But there's this hideout not far out east, isn't there? What was the name, John?"

"Maples Helipad," replied John. "Two hundred and twenty-one miles from the Arizona border."

Tim chuckled. "Jesus, John, how do you remember this shit? Must be nice being a savant. Anyway, I think that's where the other guys went - the ones who didn't get shot, anyway. I saw them take the trucks and drive away from Base. We'd better head to Maples to crash, until we find them again."

John nodded, holding Kate's hand. Her hands were covered in black smudges and large bloody cuts from climbing up the jagged metal walls of the tricopter wreckage, to save him. John also couldn't feel his own right leg. "We're gonna need to patch up, too. Tim, are you hurt?"

"No, I'm fine," he replied. Tim looked over to John and Kate as they drove on, his eyes blue as a clear sky in the time before this eternal nuclear winter. "It's not too far, we should be there before it's totally dark."

Tim gave them his awkward smile, which was heartening despite everything.

* * *

Though John had developed great relationships with countless survivors in The Resistance - after all, desperation unites people and war makes for strange bedfellows - the member he had known the longest was Tim. Their connection was unique.

In John's life, Tim had been a loyal, quiet presence. Though he didn't possess any big ideas, he could always be counted on. He had John's back whenever it was needed most, ever since they were ten years old, the first time he inadvertently saved John's life in the gaming arcade by warning him of the approaching T-1000 dressed as a policeman, searching for John.

It wasn't much and Tim of course had no idea what he was up against, but if he hadn't told John to go, then his story and that of all humanity would have ended then and there. It was almost ironic, just like everything else - an act so small and seemingly inconsequential could change everything.

Like John, Tim's childhood wasn't easy: he was sent from his home in the countryside to live with relatives in Los Angeles when his parents were busted for crack back in the eighties. Always something of an outcast, he quickly made friends with John, drawn by John's leadership qualities which gave Tim a feeling that he belonged.

As John began to open up to Tim, Tim enjoyed listening to the stories that John told about his time in Mexico, the weapons he learned to use and the junkyards he crashed in. Tim liked the stories about Sarah Connor, who was apparently insane, who insisted that John would become the saviour of the world. At that time John was mostly losing faith in those stories and Tim didn't think much of them either; after all, his own parents were pretty crazy too. When they were kids, _John Connor The World Saviour_ was nothing more than an amusing delusion they occasionally discussed. Despite that, Tim always sensed John was a bit different than the other kids, something special, even when John didn't believe in himself. Exactly how John was special, Tim didn't know, but the feeling never left him.

This long-standing lighthearted feeling of Tim's was unexpectedly confirmed with his own eyes on that fateful day at the gaming arcade, when he was approached by a cold-mannered policeman with a photograph of John Connor, asking, "Do you know this guy?"

What Tim thought was, _Oh shit, it's John! We're getting busted for stealing that money!_

What he said was, "Nah, I don't know him."

And he was off like a shot to warn John. Tim didn't want to go to juvie any more than the next young delinquent, but at that point he didn't think they were in any real danger. Only when he saw the look of existential dread on John's face as he opened the door and ran out into the hallway, did Tim have a gut understanding they were up against something sinister.

"Hey man, I think I saw that kid you were looking for- -" was all the distraction Tim could manage before the T-1000 shoved him aside so roughly he made the arcade floor just a little bit cleaner.

Tim got up and ran after the apparent policeman, who wordlessly thundered through the door after John. Tim followed, running along the narrow white hallway looking for John. He turned a corner and was deafened by the sound of a blasting shotgun, which scared him so much he slipped and fell back against the wall, sliding down until he sat on the cold tile floor, his teeth chattering, terrified tears on his ten-year-old face as the shotgun fired and fired, and then there were thumps and the sound of drywall breaking. Pieces of white plaster were strewn across the floor.

Then, silence. Crawling on his hands and knees, Tim mustered up the courage to look around the corner to where the sounds had come from. He was greeted by a ghastly sight - the dead body of the Japanese cleaner caught in crossfire lying covered in blood and surrounded by spent shells. There were massive holes in the walls the size of grown men, broken pipes leaking onto the floor, and John was nowhere to be seen.

"Ah! Murder! Help me! Help!" Tim screamed, running back towards the arcade, tripping by his pant legs. As he ran past a window, he looked out and saw John speeding away on their awful red motorbike, chased by the creepy policeman on foot. Tim was later found by several passers-by, fainted on the floor.

For several years afterwards, Tim was constantly hounded by ill-intentioned psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, trying to squeeze any information out of him about the background and whereabouts of John Connor in connection to the high-profile crimes committed by his mother and the mysterious serial killer who shot up a police station in 1984. All three had vanished without a trace - the most wanted yet the least able to be found.

"I don't know _anything_!" he said over and over at his irritating appointments with Doctor Silberman that his relatives forced him to attend.

Regardless of what Tim said, they wouldn't leave him alone and his adolescence was a troubled one. Eventually, he grew to resent his connection to John Connor, whom he hadn't seen since the day he disappeared at the game arcade. Tim convinced himself that John was a liar and nothing but trouble, and vowed to put his past behind him. For a while that worked - the media attention surrounding the case waned after a few years. Tim dropped out of school and bounced around a few odd jobs before settling into a steady gig as a club singer.

But his normal life was to be short-lived.

All of it changed in the year 2004, when Tim was nineteen years old, sitting in a diner one night having a late supper after a performance. As he ate a forkful of chicken, he noticed outside the window there stood a good-looking woman with platinum blonde hair pulled back, wearing a tight red outfit, walking towards him. Not towards the door of the diner - towards the exact spot where he sat, with her eyes fixed on him despite that she was a block away.

Tim gawked at her, bewildered. He stuck his fork into his chicken breast again, but he couldn't eat any more. The woman walked closer and closer, staring at him. The look in her eye was unsettlingly familiar. It made his stomach turn. He put down the fork almost like a knee-jerk reaction, got up and walked towards the door.

But the red-clothed woman flung open that same door and entered. Tim pulled his hat down low and his kerchief over his face and ran into the washroom. The woman walked in after him and scanned her eyes around the room. Tim had climbed into the tiny storage cupboard built into the bathroom wall and sat in there silently among brooms and a mangled fire hydrant hose.

Looking out through the crack in the door, he could see a red glow inside her eyes as she searched around the room for him. Despite that he tried to repress the memories of all the stories John used to tell him, Tim knew he was looking at a Terminator, as real as could be. He held his breath.

At this time another man, also with ginger hair, walked into the washroom. "Uh, ladies' room is over there," he said to the T-X.

The T-X looked at him seductively. "Are you Tim Parrhesia?"

"No," he said confusedly. "Now, if you don't mind moving over a bit there, I'd just like to use the toilet, right? Hello?"

She eyed him up and down. Then she pulled out a handgun and shot him dead then and there, splattering his flesh and blood all over the washroom door. She inspected his lifeless body and calmly exited the washroom. From inside the cupboard Tim heard people screaming outside and the sound of police sirens soon followed.

"Are you in there?" a voice said. Someone opened the cupboard door, making Tim flinch.

Luckily, it was the restaurant owner. He herded Tim and a bunch of other terrified people out. It felt surreal as he and the group were ushered through the dark, past many police cars and officers with no interest in them whatsoever. Within the commotion, Tim heard some people muttering about a female serial killer in town, killing swathes of seemingly random teenagers and young adults.

Tim understood he was on this Terminator's hit list. Something to do with John Connor again, no doubt. It scared his wits out that he had just witnessed a poor man brutally murdered, knowing that fate was meant for him. And he knew this thing was going to keep coming after him for as long as it was alive - John had repeated his father's words enough times to Tim when describing the Terminator: "_It can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity, remorse or fear, and it will not stop until you are dead!" _

The words played on repeat in Tim's brain filled with fear. He screamed curses for John as he drove home like a lunatic, speeding, cutting off traffic, swerving across the road, entering his flat and locking all the doors and windows. He slept with his gun under his pillow that night - or rather, he laid there in the dark, letting every little sound make him paranoid. John didn't forget, either, to drive the point home that Terminators were very, _very_ hard to kill.

Things only went from bad to worse the next day as the radio blared that the United States Air Force base, at the forefront of artificial intelligence development since the destruction of CyberDyne Systems, had been broken into and devastated, with most staff dead including General Robert Brewster. The news anchor zealously emphasised that all citizens within close range of the base were to be on high alert and prepared for possible evacuation.

"Shit, it's really happening," said Tim, reaching over from his bed and shutting off the radio. He had only fallen asleep sometime in the early morning. He rolled out of his messy bed and opened the curtains to see the afternoon sunlight.

Tim drove through town with shades on his eyes and his handgun stuck into the cup holder. He saw chaos, shops closing up and people running to hide indoors, thinking there was some awful act of war or terrorism about to happen. In a way, they were right.

He made his way to one of a few underground bomb shelters in northern Los Angeles, which were old, having been constructed following the second world war. Tim had versed himself on their locations even though they were obscure. Despite everything, some part of him still had faith in John Connor and feared Judgement Day all along.

As it turned out, the group who hid in the underground shelter became one of the few to survive in such an urban population hub, when the bombs fell from the sky at 6.p.m. that same day, bringing with them Judgement Day.

The first thing Tim heard when he stepped out of the shelter a month later was the sound of John Connor's voice, blaring from a loudspeaker on the helicopter hovering above them, waiting to rescue the survivors. John had been living off the grid since the last time Tim saw him nine years before, but when John disembarked from the helicopter, Tim recognised him instantly. And like that, the two best friends were reunited.

* * *

Tim thought of all this history as he drove the armoured vehicle through the wasteland of bones, skulls, mechanical wreckages and the effigies of past houses. Periodically, he looked aside at John and Kate, who were exhausted and had fallen asleep in their seats. There may be no fate, but in an odd way life seemed to have steered Tim into a destiny of being a loyal friend and assistant to John. Tim was the unsung hero, the hero outside the limelight, the hero we need but don't deserve.

_Chapter Eleven - End _


	12. Home Of Dead Men

**Chapter Twelve - Home of Dead Men **

Maples Helipad was tucked away at the bottom of a sheer cliff: an ideal location for establishing a base to resist SkyNet, since most lower grade Terminators had a limited distance range that their eye cameras could scope, and they didn't usually expend the time and energy to climb down sheer cliffs and check beneath them.

Usually.

When they arrived in front of the hideout - a cluster of three mobile houses, one with a makeshift radio station antenna sticking out of its roof, beside a modestly-sized helipad with a bicopter parked - it was desolate. There were huge holes torn into the two layers of barbed wire fence that surrounded the entire establishment. These holes were big enough that they drove their armoured car right through them.

There was no sign of their fellows who had fled Base Brissend on the trucks. In fact, there was no sign of people at all. They stopped and parked in front of the mobile houses. All was silent. The houses seemed to be in good condition, yet they couldn't see a single resident around.

Tim put his kevlar vest back on and exited the car to investigate, while John and Kate stayed behind. Walking up to the first mobile home, Tim kicked the door in, dodging to one side as it fell. He peered inside attentively, aiming into the room at an angle with his handgun. There were decent facilities inside: two beds, electronic equipment and clear cabinets of tools. But still no people. The second house yielded similar finds.

The third house was at the rim of the cluster and had an oddly arranged door that pointed toward the helipad. The door had already been beaten down; plank shards were all that was left of this wooden door. Approaching the door from the side, Tim looked over the broken planks. Inside, he saw what looked like a few guns thrown in a mess over the floor. And then he saw the pile of clothes beside them. No, not a pile of clothes. A person. A person lying supine on the floor.

And there came a sound. Out from the shredded door emerged a T-800, rotting flesh drooping from its body and most of its endoskeleton exposed. Tim smelled it before he saw it. He jumped back and bolted towards the car. The Terminator ran at him.

Tim fired his taser gun at the Terminator, but the range wasn't far enough and he certainly didn't have the blind courage to walk any closer to it, so the probes missed and fell to the ground, the sparks disappearing in the air. Armed with an assault rifle, the Terminator came closer to Tim and fired, hitting Tim on his bulletproof vest. He stumbled but didn't fall.

"John! Help!" Tim yelled.

"Ram it with the car, John!" said Kate, as John scrambled into the driver's seat.

"Hold on tight," replied John. He fired up the engine and turned the car around, speeding up after seeing Tim move out of the way.

A car, after all, was often the best weapon one could possess, and John had acquired some crazy driving skills of his own over the years. He drove towards the Terminator, on the trajectory to ram into it. But it jumped up onto the hood of the armoured car before it could be hit, covering the windscreen and obscuring their front view.

"Duck down!" said John, putting his arm over Kate and pulling her down with him.

The Terminator fired at them, shattering holes all over the windscreen and sending bullets flying over their heads.

John turned the steering wheel sharply and accelerated. He crashed the car into the third house, crushing the Terminator between the car's metal skin and broken bits of house. It was a disturbing sight, the face of the rotting Terminator pressed up against the windscreen, the putrid flesh and rusting hydraulics wholly visible, pressed down by timber and rubble piled above it.

John reversed the car out of the smashed house and the stunned Terminator slid down onto the ground, where Tim shot it with the taser, this time successfully. John stopped the car. He and Kate ran outside and helped Tim to pluck off the CPU port cover and remove the hostile Terminator's CPU. Finally, this one was dead.

"You are terminated," muttered John to himself, holding the bloodstained CPU in the palm of his hand and closing his fingers around it.

Together, armed with the taser gun and the assault rifle seized from the Terminator, they inspected the third house, the inside of which was a mess and had almost no intact floor left after being rammed with the car. They found the dead body of an unrecognisable man. He had been dead for months at least and laid on the floor inside this room, where the hostile Terminator had also stayed, dormant, waiting for its next victim. There was neither time nor energy nor supplies for a proper burial for the late man, but they summarily covered his body in the debris.

While John and Tim were doing this, Kate wandered out onto the helipad and inspected the bicopter parked there. It was one of the usual ones used by SkyNet, evidently captured, for it had the letters "**Cyberdyne BC-7337**" printed in jet black on its side. The letters were scraped and flaking.

Someone had spray-painted "_Vive __L__a __R__ésistance_" in bright red letters with drips trailing off them over the black print.

There was soot around the base of the rotor mast. They had clearly tried to take off too quickly, without checking temperature and pressure, and it blew out the engine. Kate knew a thing or two about aeroplanes from her youth, having been raised by her father Robert Brewster, who was an air force general after all.

When she went to check the concealed cockpit, she found the dead body of a second man, sitting in the pilot's seat, his hands still clutching the yoke. His head was twisted in a freakish direction and laid on top of his hands. His skeletal face stared at Kate with empty eye sockets, a sight that shook her, but it didn't take long for her to compose herself - she had seen worse. She dragged the body of the deceased pilot out of the cockpit and laid it out on the ground, removing his armoured vest and other useful gadgets from his tool belt.

At the same time, John and Tim found many supplies in the houses and they seemed intact and untouched. These men had evidently been surviving quite well here, when they were taken by surprise by a Terminator that found them, and neither managed to get out of the fix they were in.

The trio armed themselves from the deceased men's supplies and settled in for the night, dragging mattresses from the houses into their armoured car, which felt more secure than the houses made of flimsy wood that had already failed their previous occupants. They scattered piles of debris all around the perimeter of the car, in hopes that should there be any intruders, they would walk through it and make noises to alert them.

The first night passed uneventfully, and for the next few days the trio stayed at Maples Helipad, collecting themselves, tending to their wounds using the first aid kit they found in the smashed house, and doing repair work.

Kate opened and inspected the bicopter engine to access the blowout. "I can fix this," she said. "If I could weld these broken edges together. It's a long shot, but it'll work."

As Kate worked on finding a way to fix the engine, Tim was the handyman, working on the car and struggling to try and mend the holed fence by creating a new barrier using broken planks from the rammed house.

John, in the meantime, went into the first house, which contained all of the two dead men's electronic equipment. There was no generator at this hideout, only a lone solar panel. Having been in disuse for so long, the battery had gathered a decent amount of power.

Bit by bit, John booted up all the computers in the room, accessing the records of the occupants here. There were records of Maples Helipad communicating with several Resistance alliances, including his own, but all records halted six months ago. Being such a small hideout, no-one at large had paid attention when it dropped off the radar, since small-scale losses and wipeouts were common. The larger divisions of The Resistance were distracted by the plan to assault the major base at Brissend and the loss of Maples Helipad went unnoticed.

John dragged both dead Terminators - the important one they brought with them in the car and the disintegrated one that had killed the two occupants of the hideout - into the room. He plugged both CPUs into the computers, pulling up the endless lines of code onto the screens.

He expected them to be similar - that the mutinied Terminator's programs had been secretly reset by someone, and so it should have similar coding to this Terminator that worked for SkyNet and was never captured.

But as all the differences came up on the screen, he was stumped.

_Chapter Twelve - End_


	13. Flight Of The Dutiful Martyr

**Chapter Thirteen - Flight of the Dutiful Martyr**

The code of the antagonistic Terminator John had just rammed into the house here at Maples Helipad was exactly as he had expected: It was a T-800, Model 129, in read-only mode, set on a trajectory to infiltrate locations with human activity and then to terminate anything organic with a core temperature higher than 35 degrees Celsius. There was nothing new here.

But the code of the Terminator he had brought with him truly surprised him, because there appeared to be nothing wrong with the code - it looked exactly ordinary for a reprogrammed Terminator, a Guardian, created using the Fisher Method. No modifications, no resets, nothing unusual. Even the record for modifications indicated that nothing had been changed since this Terminator was initially shipped in the year 2018, a whole fourteen years ago.

Everything he saw in the code pointed to this being a normal Guardian who would fearlessly protect and serve all humans and be physically unable to harm anyone. But this was a Terminator who had just mutinied and shot him twice. It felt like his own eyes were lying to him.

John scrolled through all of the code, over hours and hours through many days, looking for disrepancies, looking over every line of code over and over. He was sure he would find something amiss if he looked hard enough, but he never did.

After several weeks of staying at Maples Helipad, during which time they had recuperated from their injuries somewhat and cleaned up and repaired the place, John cleaned off the dead flesh from the antagonistic Terminator and reprogrammed it using his own method different from Fisher, so the creepy metal skeleton could stand guard while the trio worked or rested.

John did nothing with the Terminator they brought with him. He left that one alone and shut down. Even though he mostly kept his cool on the outside, John became angry at the Terminator, frustrated at his own inability to find out why the Terminator had mutinied in the first place, how he and others killed so many of John's dearest friends. For though they kept busy during the day and avoided discussion of this elephant in the room, all three felt guilty and lost sleep at night over the friends who suddenly died in vain.

John turned his attention to trying to get the radio to work again - another unfortunately painstaking line of work. He spent hours upon hours manipulating the radio antenna, listening through static white noises for so long it nigh drove him insane, changing frequencies, seeking a human voice.

Two months passed and they had begun discussing about moving on and abandoning Maples Helipad to look for surviving alliance members elsewhere, when early one cold evening, as John was fiddling with the frequency on the radio again, he received a discernible sound through the hours of white noise.

It was a series of beeps on a loop, sent out over a large range of frequencies. John had heard this before, he knew what this was for - to calibrate any survivors to the communication frequency of the sender. He listened to the spacing of the beeps carefully, scribbling on a notepad. Earlier, different alliances of The Resistance had communicated using morse code, but now they had adopted a similar system of their own creation that SkyNet couldn't decipher.

Translating the message into numbers, John began to tune the radio towards the designated frequency.

Then, Kate entered the room. "John, I've got the bicopter's fuel tank up and running, and siphoned in some fuel, too. No more leaks!" she said excitedly. "But I can't get the onboard computer to boot up, can you help me?"

"That's awesome! I'll go check it out," John said, walking out of the door. He handed Kate the notepad on his way out. "There's definitely someone around, broadcasting these numbers on a wide frequency range. See if you can tune in and reach somebody." He walked away towards the bicopter.

"Oh, thank God," Kate sighed in relief and sat down at the controls, tweaking the frequency of the radio. In a surprisingly short time, she received an incoming voice.

"..._51°28′38″N__, 50__52__′__55__″__E, scattered, moving south-east-east, calling all alliances, requesting backup..._"

"Come in, come in," said Kate into the radio transceiver. She grabbed the pen and wrote down the co-ordinates the voice gave, while repeating her request.

"_Resistance, Resistance, Los Angeles Alliance, San Fernando Platoon, r__eceiving you loud and clear. Codeword: Revelation. To whom am I speaking? Over." _

"I'm Kate Brewster Connor. Calling from Maples Helipad. I and John Connor and Tim Parrhesia survived the mutiny at Base Brissend. What is the condition of your survivors? Over."

The person on the other side of the radio didn't answer Kate's question. After an odd pause, he said through the radio, "_John Connor is there with you?_"

"Affirmative, he is here." After Kate said this, the person said nothing more. "Hello?" she said. "Come in."

The radio had gone silent and the voice was no longer being broadcast. As Kate began fiddling with the dials again, wondering what had gone wrong, John returned and entered the room.

"Good news, I fixed up the bicopter's computer, it's good for flight. Did you find any signals on the radio?"

"Yes, but...it cut off all of a sudden," said Kate.

"That's strange," said John, sitting beside Kate and fiddling with the dials alongisde her.

"I told them we're here at Maples Helipad. They gave their location..." Kate looked down at the notebook. "They're-"

Kate's trail of words was broken when they heard Tim yelling from outside. "John! Kate! You better come check this out!"

As John and Kate emerged outside, they found their friend at the edge of the wire fence, standing behind the makeshift wooden barrier he had constructed to block the huge hole, holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes and looking out to the distance. When John approached him, Tim handed him the binoculars.

Far in the distance, making its way down the calm slope around the sheer cliff over Maples Helipad, was a single army truck. Night was falling and John could see no details from this far. Who was driving? Was this a friend or a foe?

"Tim, grab the guns and stay close to the car," said John. "Kate, be ready to start the bicopter."

Kate went over to the helipad and Tim did as he was told. Returning with the weapons, Tim found John crouched at the side of the car and joined him there. They took care to keep in cover, holding their assault guns and looking over the fence at the slowly approaching truck, its headlights like two prowling eyes in the blue shadow of dusk. They held on tightly to their weapons.

The truck drove steadily and came to a stop about thirty feet away from the fence. From inside the front window there came the blinding glare of a bright floodlight, illuminating the side of their car that faced the wooden barrier. A moment passed and the door of the truck's passenger side opened and out stepped the person holding the floodlight, with a thick black wire dragging behind him to keep it powered.

Tim peeked his head out a little from behind the car to look.

"Tim, is that you?" The man with the light called out.

Tim squinted at the person, holding his hand in front of his face to block the blaze of the floodlight. Then an elated look emerged on Tim's face washed by the white light. He recognised him as one of their trusted lieutenants. "Kurt!" said Tim. "You survived! Where are your people?"

"Might not be Kurt," whispered John, giving Tim a wary glance.

"Right," said Tim. Then, he yelled in Kurt's direction, "How's Buddy? Is Buddy doing alright?"

Tim anxiously waited for an answer, clutching his rifle tightly, ready to shoot should the answer be unfavourable.

"The fuck are you smoking?" Kurt's voice yelled back. "I don't fucking know! We didn't have time to take a helicopter with us while being attacked by that mutiny."

"It's Kurt," said Tim. He left the cover of the car despite John grabbing for him to hold him back.

Tim approached Kurt and they met like old friends. At this point the other survivors were also disembarking from the back of the truck and walking towards Maples Helipad, holding their flashlights and torches in the dark. Tim looked over them, all in quite bad shape. They walked quickly with few words, unimpressed looks written on their faces.

"Good on you for making it out, Tim," said Kurt. "We're fifty-seven survivors here. Lots of casualties, injuries. Thank God we made it here though, the truck's almost out of fuel. Are there first aid supplies here?"

"Yes, there are. Get them to come this way," said Tim, gesturing for Kurt to go towards the hole in the fence. The first aid kit was still stashed in the back of the car.

"You're on your own here?" asked Kurt, eyeing the smashed third house.

"Apparently, Maples Helipad has been empty since six months ago, a Terminator killed everyone who used to live here, but I got here with John and Kate."

Kurt paused for a moment, seemingly shocked. "John Connor survived? He's here with you?"

"Of course, he's right over there," Tim pointed at the armoured car.

Without further explanation, Kurt ran at the car. "John Connor is hiding behind that car! Kill that traitor!" He exclaimed at the people around him.

"What?" shouted Tim.

Everyone ignored him and they all bolted to the car, torchlights paving their way. Covered by a dozen flickering halos, John realised he was very much in trouble. He got up and ran. Their gunshots hit the ground all around him. The people who were once his fellows, who had once followed him and respected him and put all their trust in him, now ran after him with their guns blazing, convinced he had betrayed them and caused the Terminators' mutiny. As they shot at him from behind, John ran towards the helipad, towards where Kate was.

Knowing well the logistics around his own slapdash fence, Tim ran ahead of the group chasing after John. He managed to get between them and John, and stood in the pursuers' way, his arms outstretched, almost catching their bullets. Tim standing in the way made them cease their fire, if only briefly.

"It wasn't John! You've all been fooled!" Tim yelled, the colour on his face washed out by the torchlights of the pursuing party. He stood there like a ghost, a lonely white figure in the dark. The cold wind blew in his red hair as he faced the cluster of fifty-seven people.

"I get it, he's your friend," said Kurt. "He was our friend too. It's not like I want to believe he betrayed us, but the truth is the truth that we've all seen with our own eyes. Now move aside!"

"No," said Tim. But he was trembling. Somehow it was multitudes more terrifying to face down his friends, than to face down the numerous soulless Terminators in the field. As the group advanced towards him with their guns out, Tim weakened, his limbs going numb from fear. He fell aside and let them pass. In that moment he learned that he, after all, didn't have that kind of courage.

During this exchange, Kate clinged onto the side of the bicopter and slammed the engine hatch closed, keeping her eyes on the torchlit group of people in the dark distance, with Tim's silhouette standing in front of them all, buying time for her and John if nothing else.

"They're after me, Kate, they're after me! Get into the plane and get out of here!" said John from the ground beside the bicopter.

Kate jumped down to the ground. "No, _you_ get into the plane!"

"Listen, _I'm_ the one they want. You'll get caught in the crossfire. Get in the plane now and go somewhere safe." In his frustration, John grabbed Kate by her coat - something he had never done before, not even in the direst of situations - and pulled her towards the door of the bicopter.

Kate pushed and flailed against him. "If you're the only one they want then I'm safe here! Don't you understand? You _can't_ die! You're too important!"

"If I'm an important world saviour, then listen to me and get in!" said John, continuing to urge Kate to enter the bicopter despite her resistance.

"Don't you get it?" she screamed at him. She stopped resisting and threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly. "You're important not just to the world...you're important to me. You might have been born to be the saviour of humanity, but I didn't stick with you for some higher purpose. I did it because I chose to. To me you're just John. I love you and_ I_ need you to stay alive."

Her voice was muffled and almost inaudible, but he heard every word. For the briefest moment the two stood still embracing each other, despite everything. They listened to each other's frantic breaths and heard their hearts racing.

Kate ran her hand across the back of John's jacket, feeling the lines of embroidery that formed a picture of a puppy. Always a lover of animals since before she pursued her career as a vet, she had hand-sewn the design herself and given the jacket to him for his nineteenth birthday, shortly after Judgement Day. Through the years he had often worn it under his kevlar: a quiet reminder of her, a quiet reminder of them, a side of him that almost no-one else knew of.

She could hardly believe it had been almost thirty years since they first met. Who knew that a silly handmade piece of clothing could last so long? Who even thought a marriage could last in a world like this, but how many more years could it be?

Kate let go of John and hurriedly started the bicopter's engine as the torchlight behind them brightened and Tim's distant shadow fell away. The pursuers advanced closer and closer to them. This small plane with only a small amount of fuel inside its fuel tank would not be able to carry more than one person far. So, John entered and Kate stayed behind.

The bicopter lifted off just as the pursuing group reached the helipad, their accumulated gunshots deafening everyone as they shot at the hovering bicopter.

Once the bicopter's doors were closed, their shots were futile in stopping its liftoff. After all, it was these planes that SkyNet built to combat against The Resistance's guns. One stray gunshot, however, caught the bicopter's left engine, in the weak area left by Kate's rushed repair welding. The black smoke emanating from the bullet hole went unnoticed by anyone in the night.

John was in something of a trance as he ascended higher, alone, in the bicopter. All of his own people turned against him. It was the nightmare to end nightmares - humanity, already struggling and on the verge of wipeout, were fighting and killing each other rather than standing united against SkyNet, their common enemy.

It was something he never once anticipated: he had faith in the people and faith in himself, perhaps too much of it. He thought that once the prophency came true, they were bound to defeat SkyNet and reclaim peace. He didn't anticipate a drawback like this. The knowledge that he had fallen down when he was one step away from the finish line despaired him like nothing else - at least in previous rock bottoms he knew he was on the right path.

The bright floodlights below were waving wildly into the sky, brushing across his bicopter. Distant gunshots continued to ring out: shots from rifles held by the people, who voted with their bullets to depose him from the throne he'd been elevated to twenty-eight years earlier, the throne he'd been raised to take since the day he was born.

John realised now that he may have been much too naive; too dependent on the plan set for him that he forgot he was the writer of his own fate as much in a negative way as in the positive way Sarah taught him. Over the years he had learned never to doubt, he learned never to think too much. He could help everyone else but he couldn't help himself out of his own way of thinking.

He could see at the middle of all their torches stood Kate's tiny figure, left behind down below, illuminated by the cold lights as the people closed in around her like birds of prey. John buried his face in the yoke of the bicopter, slamming his hands onto the side. This cross should have been his to bear, not hers.

He reminded himself, again and again, of that lesson the Terminator who died at Crystal Peak taught him so many years before: stop despairing, despair is not useful. But then, all he felt was shame.

The bicopter went on to fly for not even two hours before its damaged left engine gave out. It crash-landed into a desolate former cornfield cupped in the palm of a valley, with evergreen trees in the distance and the silhouettes of blue mountains, their flat ridges resting against the sky, indifferent to all of humanity's successes and failures.

_Chapter Thirteen - End_


	14. Road Paved With Good Intentions

**Chapter Fourteen - Road Paved with Good Intentions**

"So you're saying somebody was there at Brissend trying to sabotage you, and you think it's Miles Dyson's daughter. Don't you think that's a far fetch?" said Conrad to John as the latter finished his story.

The sun had risen high and now it was ever more clear how pale and weary they all were. They huddled together in a close circle, Auntie Tess and Conrad and John and the two Terminators, sitting on the folded chairs in the truck's cargo bed, breathing hot breaths into their cold hands.

"Unless a man from the future comes to tell me again, there's nothing I can be totally sure of. Not anymore. But from what I know, this is the most likely truth," replied John.

"Sounds about right," Ava piped from the front seat where she laid, propping her head up and looking through the hatch window into the cargo bed. "If somebody killed my dad, I'd hold a gripe with them for thirty years, too. But I've already killed the Terminator that killed mine."

"Ava, try to get some more sleep," said Tess quietly.

Conrad looked down at the old T-800's arms, which he had gingerly rebandaged since calming down from the earlier angry altercation with John. He asked John, "So, you're saying that like me, you also doubt the Fisher method. You think it's rigged. Then all these years, why didn't you ever see anything wrong until now? And if you're so savvy, why didn't you reprogram them yourself?"

"I did, back in the boot camp days. It wasn't long before we were under fire all the time, hiding underground in the worst days. Being a leader is a full time job. I'm not Jesus Christ," John said sardonically.

Now that it had become clear this group of Catchers weren't intent on immediately killing him, John had relaxed a little, insofar as one could relax and engage in some gallows humour when they had a fate of infection and starvation ahead of them as far as they could see.

"Still, you of all people could've stopped this, you could've _not_ believed that random voice talking to you through the transmitter pretending to be your wife. Now we're back to square one and we're all going to starve to death," Conrad moaned.

"What's happened has happened," said Tess, looking the weariest of them all, with bloodstains still on her collar and around the corners of her lips. "Now, we have to move on and find someone from the alliance if we want to live."

"Like John wants us to? But he's- I just can't trust him," said Conrad.

Tess sighed. "Who are you going to trust, then? That Terminator is after us. It's only a matter of time. We're going to die if we don't get help, and I want all of you to live. John, I'm with you."

After some more back-and-forth between them, Conrad begrudgingly allowed John to explain the plan that had been brewing in his mind during the small bit of peaceful downtime he spent in the shack. John jumped down from the cargo bed and explained his plan by drawing in the dirt with a stick. Conrad and Tess followed, standing beside him and looking over his shoulders.

"Here, we go slightly off course from the road," said John. "There's an old industrial complex here, about two miles from Fort Spict. It'll be easier to reach than the fort, which is built on top of an overlooking hill. We might find some supplies in the industrial complex, if we're lucky, but even if we're not, it's one of the places I know is a good position to defend, and rest - I'm thinking of Ava. With the fuel we have in the truck, we might make it a little more than halfway there, and then we'll have to walk. And try to hopefully get the attention of my fellows, Eustice and Parker, who should be there at the fort now."

Everyone looked down at the dirt scrawling. The two Terminators had also descended from the cargo bed and were standing among them, though it couldn't be said whether they were concerned with the plan or just with bodyguarding. Ava opened the side door and poked her head out from inside the truck, wanting to be in on what was happening.

"Seems like a long shot," said Conrad. "But I guess Auntie Tess is right, after all, whatever else we try seems to lead us somewhere shit. I suppose there are no other options." He rubbed his bloodshot eyes and turned away. He spoke no more and climbed into the truck, past Ava, closing the side door behind himself.

John threw the stick back in the mud. "You know, I can't promise you we'll be saved," John said, aside to Tess, his head bowed. "Even if we do everything right."

"You don't have to. I don't expect to be handed all the answers. John, you're a leader and all, but...it's fine to not know the answer sometimes. This is our plan and we're saving ourselves, and we'll figure something out, together," said Tess. She gave John a half-smile and a tap on the arm. "Let's go, then."

So they drove - the four of them and their two Terminators - for several hours, until the previously rather more idyllic barren rural landscape gave way to jagged rocks and rubble, with the occasional dismembered skeleton here and there, so they could not forget they were advancing back into the war zone. The thick, polluted air descending upon them didn't do wonders to ease them, either. This place used to be hill country, but now it was pure hell.

They stopped a few times at wrecked shelters and shacks and searched them, in hope of finding some gasoline. But in the end none was to be found. All they got were a few packets of preserved food from one collapsed shed, and a grave reminder of just how many survivors like them had perished along this road. There were skeletal corpses aplenty, tucked up in exhausted positions inside the shacks, dead not from Terminators but from starvation.

Shortly before dusk, they could feel the truck starting to lose power. Despite they made it further than expected, now they were running out of fuel. Before them loomed the reality that they wouldn't be able to get as far as Fort Spict, or even as far as the industrial complex, on what fuel they had left. They all knew it, but no-one talked about it.

The four stayed silent, cooped up together inside the tiny truck cabin, neglecting the elephant in the room. No-one wanted to breach the topic of what they might do once the truck stopped for good. Especially, what they might do with Ava. She was so badly burned she still could barely move and by now she had gotten feverish too.

Shortly after sundown, they stopped the truck by the side of the road so they could rest and clear their heads in the cold evening air.

"If we have to then I'll walk to Fort Spict," said John as they were sitting outside the truck, eating stale packaged food they had found in the smashed shed. "You all stay here with the truck. I'll bring back help."

"I'll go with you," said Tess, inspecting and reloading her pistol.

"No, no, I will," said Conrad sheepishly. He had stayed silent before, reluctant to volunteer, but now that his older lady companion had, there was no staying silent for him.

"I'll go by myself. You three stay here and wait. Trust me, it'll be safer if you stick together as much as possible," said John. "And keep the Terminators close."

"What about you?" said Tess.

"I'll be fine. SkyNet's been trying to kill me for forty-eight years, for crying out loud, and they failed every time so far." John picked up their last spare loaded rifle and put on his kevlar vest. Now it fitted worse because his green jacket was so unevenly burnt and battered and limp. He nodded at his companions and prepared to leave.

At this time, they heard a rustle of gravel not far from them. They all looked towards the noise and both Terminators took to their guns. Conrad dropped his food and bolted up. Auntie Tess got up too from where she sat and held out her handgun.

"Get in the truck," said the old T-800, clutching his assault rifle, his eyes fixed to the direction of the noise.

"But there's no fuel," said Conrad.

"Now!" the old T-800 said.

Shaken, they all sped into the truck without more questions. From behind the gravelly slope emerged a group of Terminators, five or six or seven of them, none of which had a skin sheath disguise. They were simply bare metal skeletons with glowing red eyes, heavily armed, come to kill. Truly, the party had returned to the war zone.

The truck's engine took several turns of the key to start. The lights on the dashboard display flickered. John stepped on the accelerator and off they went, despite the truck lurched forward unevenly, its fuel running short.

Chasing after them, the group of skeletal Terminators opened fire, the bullets clanging as they shot into the rear of the truck. The old T-800 and Oakie crouched prone in the cargo bed, firing back at them, alternately aiming for the fuel cells in their chests and the hydraulics powering their limbs.

The group had not driven far when one of the pursuing Terminator's bullets hit a wheel and they felt the truck pull to one side and tumble off the road, rolling into a ditch and crashing into the steep hill that framed one side of the road. The truck skidded and upon crashing it turned on its side with the wheels spinning in mid-air. The four people shrieked as they were slammed against one side of the truck cabin, piling over each other.

Oakie climbed onto the toppled truck shoved the top door open. He reached in and helped each of them out as the old T-800 stood sturdily on top of the overturned truck, behind them, shooting at the metal skeletons that had caught up and were closing in on them.

"Up the hill!" said John. "SkyNet made them to cover flat land, they can't climb well."

Following John's lead, they scampered up the hill, despite they were all covered in cuts and bruises from the crash. The hill was too steep to run on yet calm enough that it was not difficult to scale. Soon, John, Conrad and Tess were almost over the hill, leaving the crashed truck behind them.

But Ava, injured from the fire, had barely struggled out of the overturned truck, helped by Oakie, before the skeletal Terminators were upon them. They opened fire on the truck. Oakie stood in front of Ava, hugging her, covering her with his body to block the bullets. He made sure to keep his back to the attackers so his fragile combustion engine was also out of harm's way.

Oakie turned his arm to the side to shoot at the skeletal Terminators with his rifle, using only one hand while the other held onto Ava. Little white plumes of down feathers bloomed up from Oakie's puffer jacket as each bullet hit him. He stood there, solid as a wall, protecting Ava.

John turned from Conrad and Tess and went back down the hill to where the slope met with the overturned truck. He crouched low so he, too, was covered by Oakie. He took Ava's hand and tried to help her up onto the hill, but quickly realised she was in no state to climb, even with his help. Her scarred legs couldn't hold her weight. She tripped and slid back, and she and John both fell down behind the overturned truck. They landed in the ditch between the truck and the hill, crouching against the sooty pipes on the truck's exposed underside, listening to the bullets ringing on its metal body.

They saw Oakie and the old T-800 had also jumped down from atop the truck, and now stood in front of them, so they were shielded by their Guardians on one side, and by the beaten-up truck on the other. Tess and Conrad were some way away up on the hill, looking back down at them, but knew better than to return to help.

Their Guardians shot at the seven incoming Terminators, but John knew full well they had little ammo left. _Click, click. _Both the Old T-800 and Oakie's rifles had run dry. They stood still, not quite sure what to do next. They backed closer to John and Ava, their arms outstretched and overlapping each other; one last line of defence as the seven skeletal Terminators loomed in.

John looked around. He looked up, past the pipes and the spinning tyre of the overturned truck, at the darkened sky. Up was the only way out of here now. Somehow they needed to get up there. But what of Ava? She certainly couldn't climb.

Then, from over the side of the truck shot out a little face that stared down at John, startling him out of every thought. The face of a little girl, her hair messy, her clothes tatty, her eyes glowing blue.

It was the little Terminator from the storeroom they had just escaped.

_Chapter Fourteen - End_


	15. Gift From The Man Who Wore Green Glasses

**Chapter Fifteen - A Gift from the Man Who Wore Green Glasses **

Before, they were surrounded from every side except above. But now, the most dangerous force that was currently after them was now staring down at John, looming over him. He tried to stay calm, thinking of all the possible methods he might use to escape. When he could find no answer, he began to panic. He grabbed around the exhaust pipes of the overturned truck, looking for something they could use, somewhere they could escape from. Something, anything._ No_.

The sounds of bullets hitting the flesh of their two Guardians continued, inches away from his face. Both John and Ava dropped as low to the ground as they could, expecting the tiny Terminator above to begin stabbing at them with liquid metal knives at any second.

The little Terminator looked down at them, her eyes fixed under emotionless thin brows. She eyed them for a long time, even for a Terminator. Then, slowly, her head rotated to a freakish angle, and she looked at the seven skeletal Terminators that were attacking the party. She paused for a while, almost like she had a brief shutdown.

Then, without missing a beat, the little Terminator leaped off the overturned truck and into the line of fire between the skeletal Terminators and the two Guardians. Flecks of silvery liquid metal flew off her face and body as the bullets grazed her.

John stared at her through the gaps between the two Guardians, astounded. He knew well that Terminators had detailed aiming systems; they did not shoot indiscriminately and they never shot their own. He expected the seven attacking Terminators to cease fire as soon as the little one stepped in their way, but instead these skeletal Terminators seemed to have no reaction to her. They shot her as earnestly as they had shot at the group's truck.

The little Terminator charged towards the line of metal skeletons, bullets notwithstanding. She plunged her hand, transformed into a liquid metal knife, into the chest of one, severing the connections within the battery so the Terminator fell dead upon the ground. One by one, the tiny cyborg attacked and took down each of the pursuing Terminators. Soon, she had annihilated all seven, seemingly without much effort.

She looked back at the party and their overturned truck, scanning them up and down with her eyes, standing atop the pile of metal rubble emanating smoke and electric sparks, that used to be a group of functional Terminators a moment before. Then, she jumped down from the cluster of destroyed Terminators, turned away and sped off into the distance, over the hill, in the general direction of Fort Spict.

All four people stayed where they were, agape, for a long time after the little Terminator had disappeared from their sight: Tess and Conrad perched on top of the small hill, John and Ava sitting in the dirt beside the overturned truck, with their two friendly Terminators in front of them, each having a look of equally dumbfounded blankness on their robotic faces.

It was Oakie who first moved from his place and went to investigate the pile of dead Terminator endoskeletons that were left in front of them. He squatted down before the pile and gawked at it while it made buzzing noises slightly quieter than his own combustion engine.

"Get back from that!" yelled Conrad from on the hill. "It might be a trap!"

"But wasn't that-" Tess said quietly to Conrad. "Wasn't that the kid Terminator we just got away from?"

Conrad stared back at her, his shiny brows knitted up and his mouth hanging slightly open. "What is going on?" he whispered, shaking his head.

Tess and Conrad climbed down the hill and joined John and Ava beside the truck, checking them over, making sure they were not any worse for wear than they had already been before.

"Could there be more than one of them?" said Auntie Tess, her eyes darting around, maybe in fear, maybe in sheer defeated confusion.

"This makes no sense!" said Conrad, standing at the foot of the hill, facing their toppled truck. "Nothing makes sense anymore! Why didn't it attack us? It was obviously here to kill us before!"

"No, it makes perfect sense now. _Everything_ makes sense now," John blurted out. Enthusiastically, he stood up from where he leaned against the truck and faced his group of friends, huffing and puffing. "They're not on the same side! Those normal Terminators-those seven Terminators with no skin that were chasing us, those are just regular SkyNet Terminators. They were here to kill us, nothing more, nothing less. But that little one, that weird one, that crazy one...it wasn't sent by SkyNet."

"Then who sent it?" asked Tess.

"The man who wore green glasses," replied John. "The guy who was chasing me at Base Brissend. He sent it after us, and wants something more than just to kill me."

His friends looked up at him, waiting for an explanation, and he continued, "The small Terminator had a delay in action - a tell-tale sign it's been receiving remote commands. That guy is manually commanding this thing from somewhere. He's making its every move, and now he's trying to keep us all alive. He wants to hold onto us for something else and he's not letting SkyNet mess with us." John scoped around the area as he spoke, making sure there was no-one hiding close by.

"What?" said Conrad. "How do you know all this? And who's this green glasses man?"

John looked up over the hill and said, "I have an idea of who he is, but I can't be sure...I have a hunch about what he's going to do next, though. We have to find help."

"I'm so tired," said Ava softly. She seemed to no longer care much about any of these developments. She stayed there on the ground, half-sitting, half-lying, curled up against the pipes on the truck's underside, with white down feathers stuck all over her from Oakie's jacket. Oakie gently picked her up and carried her over to flat ground. He sat her down on one of their folding chairs that had fallen off the back of the truck during the crash.

"Let's try to get us all to the industrial complex quickly," said John, looking up at the pale grey sky sheeted in stars, just barely visible through the thick air. "It's almost impossible to defend ourselves in the dark out here in the open. Once we get to the industrial complex, it'll be easier for the Terminators to cover us. Then you can all rest. And I'll go to Fort Spict for help."

John walked up to the other side of the overturned truck, muttering to his companions, "Keep it together guys, we need to make it a little further. You two, help me turn this over." He looked over at the old T-800 and Oakie.

It wasn't a difficult task for their two Guardians to push the overturned truck back onto its wheels, though the truck was very much worse for wear after the crash. The door was hanging on one corner, the sides of the cargo bed had fallen off, the wheels were punctured, the metal skin of the truck was dented in every place and bits of wire and metal plates were sticking out here and there.

John climbed into the dusty driver's seat and turned the key. Nothing. He turned the key again, and again, and this time the key outright snapped in half. He sat there in the dark like an idiot, holding half a car key in his hand, surrounded by what could now only allegedly be called a truck. He had tried to start this thing. He had actually thought there was still one single chance in hell it was going to drive.

"What the fuck am I doing?" John whispered to himself.

The group gathered their belongings, which were scattered all over the road. They took only their weapons and the very essential possessions and rolled them up inside their blankets to sling over their shoulders like duffle bags. They had no choice but to abandon the smoking wreckage of their truck where it died, for all it was still worth.

So now they had no shelter and no car, and traveled on foot exposed in the night, walking in the direction of the industrial complex, with nothing to guide them except a compass and John's memory of all the places he had been. Oakie helped Ava along and the old T-800 walked at the front of their single-file, scouting ahead with his keen laser eyes. This was the furtherest from ideal circumstances they could get, especially after their itinerary diverged from the main road. None of them had been in such a vulnerable state in a long time. If another Terminator was to appear now, their party might be vanquished tonight. They walked but they didn't speak. The loss of the truck was another huge blow to every one of them, and their minds were all wandering.

It was well into the night by the time they saw the silhouette of the old industrial complex appear against the clouded sky.

They walked through the outdoor section of the industrial complex, full of tall concrete tanks and tangles of electrical wires and resisters, boilers and pipes. Adjacent to this was the main factory building of the complex. Some time ago, this used to be a plant that manufactured mechanical parts. But just like the rest of the world, it now stood only as a reminder of its former function, a reminder of how things were once, a reminder of how the rage of Judgement Day had scourged the surface of the earth.

The building stood there eerily. Most of its long windows were knocked out, with shards of broken glass sticking out from the sides of the window frames like open mouths of crooked teeth. The tall walls, once whitewashed, were now covered in streaks of water damage and blotches of brown rust.

The inside was similarly derelict, coated in dust and littered with old industrial scraps. There was a jungle of old machinery that had sat there, silently, for many years. A few large boilers had gaping holes at the top of them; evidently, they had exploded after a lack of maintenance to carry out routine depressurisation. Even twenty-eight years later, it was easy to see how judgement day took this particular factory by surprise.

The four observed all this but did not discuss it. They were far too exhausted and the mood was heavy enough. They chose an area beside a row of stopped conveyor belts to rest, laying down their old blankets and pieces of clothing they had managed to cart around this far. This particular spot had plenty of old machinery there for cover, and provided them with a decent view of all the entrances lest any more cyborg assailants drift in to get them.

They put all their belongings down, and having been so beaten and drained by the day's numerous narrow escapes, quickly fell asleep on the impromptu bed of blankets and clothes.

John sat there under the shadow of a sloped conveyor belt. He looked aside at his three friends, sleeping beside him. He looked up at the unmoving, nigh-invincible figures of their two Terminators - a familiar sight. It conjured up memories of many difficult times past, but to him, the sight of guarding Terminators had long since become comforting. He listened to the slow humming of the little combustion engine that Oakie wore, the shallow breaths of his companions, and the rushing sound in his own head after days of little sleep.

John wasn't any less exhausted than his companions, but he could not sleep. Now that there was no longer any immediate danger on his part, thoughts of Kate floated through his mind. He was safe here, but was she safe? Did Kurt and their resistance members hurt her? Where was she now? He feared not only for his own life, but equally for the life of his most loved one, and it was made worse by the fact that he didn't know anything of her whereabouts now and could do nothing for her.

He reminded himself not to think too far - they needed to get through this night.

_Chapter Fifteen - End_


	16. The Messiah And The Skeptic

**Chapter Sixteen - The Messiah and the Skeptic **

It had been two, three hours perhaps, since the group of four and two Terminators first settled in for the night at the abandoned industrial complex. The light of the night sky waved, woven in with the shadows of the smoggy fumes outside. It shone dimly through the empty frames of the factory's large broken windows.

The four all laid on their pile of messy belongings, attempting to sleep. Unfortunately, none of their sleep was restful, both because the factory floor was cold as ice and because of their fresh injuries. Adrenaline filled their bodies with anxiety. This place was better than sleeping out in the open, yet safety was still far from guaranteed.

They had lost all their flashlights in the three hasty escapes of the previous day. There was no way to adequately inspect all the nooks and crannies of this unfamiliar building for what might be hiding there. In the starlight they could see barely anything more than a silhouette. Only the Terminators, with their infrared eye cameras, weren't feeling in the dark. No-one liked to entirely depend on a Terminator, but tonight they had to. John hoped the night would pass by uneventfully and then the next morning he could walk to Fort Spict - without a vehicle, it would take most of the day to reach.

John heard a scraping noise and immediately sat up, staring into the dark. The old T-800, who had been standing perfectly still for hours, moved. He walked up to the large entrance on the opposite side of the hall that they had entered from, looking up at the clerestory windows above the door. Something had caught his attention there. He inspected it for a while, but then seemed to lose interest.

As he turned around to return to his former position, John saw a dark object pass in front of the tall window and shoot downwards sharply. It hit the old T-800 in his head. The blow threw him forwards and stripped off the flesh on one side of his face, exposing one of his red laser eyes. He stumbled, stunned.

"Get up! Get up! We're under attack!" shouted John, waking up his companions. They were startled. They jumped up and clutched their respective weapons.

The old T-800 quickly recovered and scanned his eyes around the room. "It's liquid metal," he said. "There's more."

"Where? Where?" yelled Conrad, though he had lost his voice. He panicked, staring around with his eyes red and wide like saucers, pointing his handgun everywhere in the dark.

They all paced around, shaking, back to back with Ava sitting at the center. Their weapons were drawn and pointed into the black where they could see nothing. They waited for the Terminators to give an answer. Each quiet second seemed like a year, as the old T-800 and Oakie scanned the darkness around the group. Not seeing what the Terminators could see made them all the more terrified.

Then Tess screamed, "Ah! It's on me! It's on me!"

She flailed about in the dark, screaming, and fired her pistol. The flash of the gunshot lit the room for the briefest moment, reflecting off something shiny that clinged onto her leg. In her panic she lost grip on her gun as she fired it and the recoil threw it out of her hand, sending it clattering onto the floor of the room that was pitch black again.

Conrad picked up one of the loose rusty pipes from the ground and attempted to swat at the offending piece of liquid metal on Tess, but in the dark it was a complete crapshoot. Tess fell to the floor, kicking and struggling. Oakie held her still with one hand and tore off the thing clinging onto her leg. She screamed as it came away. He threw it across the room, but here there was no power, and certainly no molten metal; no way to do anything more than holding it back for a short while.

Tess whimpered on the floor, clutching her leg. "I'm hurt, I'm hurt."

"Where did it go?" Conrad exclaimed. "Where is it? Oakie, where is it? _Where is it?_"

John looked up at the high windows. Only up high, near the clerestories, did enough light filter through to see something, and only when they could see something could they have any chance of defending themselves. They needed to go higher. But the only walkable place up there was the rickety metal suspended bridge that crossed over the old factory machines. There was no choice.

"Up! Get up there, there's more light," said John, leading the party up the stepladder to the bridge. He walked at the front, helping Ava up, listening to the clanging steps behind his own as his group followed him up. He did not look back.

They stopped near the middle of the suspension bridge where the light was brightest. The bridge was narrow enough that they had to walk in single file, with their two Terminators behind them. They all stared around, up, down, their hearts pounding out of their chests, gasping.

"Oh my God. Oh, God," Ava muttered.

Gaping at the end of the suspension bridge was the opening of a large ventilator shaft, with the grates almost entirely decayed away. From inside the shaft there came a sound, then another, another, like scratching footsteps punctuating the howls of the wind against the outside of the building.

A shadow waved inside the shaft.

John stumbled back, preparing to bolt in the opposite direction. Then, he heard Conrad draw in a breath sharply behind him.

"For fuck's sake, how much longer?" said Conrad with an air of raw anger. Instead of running away, he ran ahead at the shaft opening furiously, pointing his gun at it.

The shadow waved again and a figure followed, a dark mass emerging out of the shaft. Conrad fired his handgun at it, the deafening bang screeching all through the huge building, rattling through the metal pipes, bouncing off the grate floors and ceilings.

The figure was knocked back but didn't fall. Seeing this, Conrad leaped forward and fired at it several more times, sending the whole contents of his revolver's chamber into it. Even in the dark, they could see blood spraying from the figure with each bullet.

Now the person fell down the shaft, thudding against the walls.

And then there was silence. Whoever or whatever it was, it did not get back up again. After a long wait in mutual wordlessness, John walked forward, past a panting and shocked Conrad, slowly up to the platform before the ventilation shaft. He checked around the corners and the roof of the opening first. Then, he looked down into the shaft.

There, lying on the floor below the bottom opening of the shaft with her trousers torn and her blood splattered every which way, he saw the body of Auntie Tess. And only now John realised that in the dark, in the panic, he hadn't noticed that she was not among them and had not followed them up the stepladder.

As John stood horrified at this revelation, Conrad walked up and joined him, looking down the shaft. It took a long minute for the truth of what he had just done to sink in, and when it did, Conrad fell to his knees there on the suspension bridge with a rattling thud. He laid his hands on the floor. In one he still held the handgun that had just killed his dear friend. He pressed it between his palm and the cold floor, the weight of his body impressed upon it, the hardness of its metal parts digging into his skin. He stayed there shaking, holding himself up by his hands and knees, the wet strands of his dusty blonde hair dangling down over his face cast in shadows.

John sighed and turned away from the shaft, walking back across the bridge to Ava, passing their two Terminators who had also walked to the shaft opening to investigate what had transpired.

"What was it?" said Ava from where she sat on the bridge, too injured to join them.

John didn't say anything, but soon the old T-800 spoke up, "Tess is dead."

"What?" said Ava. "No, no! How? No!" she tried to get up but fell, and crawled along the bridge towards the shaft.

"Don't go there," said John, kneeling on the ground beside her and wrapping his arms around her, holding her back. "Please, I'm begging you. Don't go there."

At first she resisted, but not for long. Now they were all too defeated, too exhausted. She would have cried, but her eyes were too dry. She lied down, curled up on the bridge, her hands over her face, biting her lip, shaking her head, her sobs sounding more like quiet coughs and retches.

John sat beside her and said nothing. Conrad remained on the platform at the end of the bridge and didn't come to join them. Their two Terminators took their places along the bridge to protect them. The night's silence fell upon them once more, the silence they had wanted before, but not like this.

After a while, the old T-800 turned and looked down at John and Ava. "It is in your nature to destroy yourselves," he said.

"Stop talking," John said quietly.

As soon as he stopped talking, Oakie piped up. "I don't understand. Humans have positive and negative social relations. They say human life of an individual with positive relations to the subject is considered valuable. Then why is Conrad capable of terminating Tess?"

"Human social relations are complex and nonbinary," replied the old T-800, believing his tenure of silence to be over. "Conrad is currently displaying sadness at the termination of Tess, despite that he is the terminator."

"Shut _up_," said John.

"Yes," said the two Terminators, closing the fronts of their jackets.

Ava lifted up her head and looked in the direction of the shaft. She began to crawl towards it. John saw it, but this time he did not stop her. She crawled past Conrad, who knelt there silently, his head hung.

Ava held onto the edge of the shaft opening, hoisting herself up until the opening was at her eye level. She peered down and saw Tess, lying there way below. The look on her face was so serene, one could absolutely believe for a moment that she was simply asleep, taken far away by a peaceful dream, back home at last. That is, if not for the blood that covered her and broke any possible illusion of a silver lining to their current predicament.

Ava let herself slide back down against the outside of the shaft. She looked over to Conrad bunched up in the corner, biting her lips until a metallic taste filled her mouth. "I wish you'd died instead," she said.

Conrad didn't look at her. He continued looking down to the ground. She thought he didn't hear her at first, but he did. Slowly, he raised up his hand, the one which held the handgun.

"I have one round left," he said, checking the chamber. He clicked it back into place. He slid the gun across the floor and placed it in front of her. "If you really wish that."

Then he sat down where he was, his shoulders slumped. He turned his back to her and waited.

Ava picked up the gun and looked down at it. She could feel Oakie's heavy footsteps walking towards her, but before he reached her, she spoke, "No. I'm not going to do that. I don't want anyone to die anymore. Why can't we all just be alive like they promised?"

"Who promised?" said Conrad.

"My mum and dad," said Ava. "I was born into this apocalypse...they always said we were fighting for all people, and we'd defeat SkyNet and have a better life. And then they had to die, and leave me to Auntie Tess. And now Auntie Tess had to die too."

After this, they all fell silent again. Both John and Conrad were at a loss for words. No words of comfort did they have for her that she hadn't heard before, and they themselves could make no promises either that were sure to be kept.

And slowly, uneventfully, the sky turned lighter, and eventually the sun began to peek from the east side, behind the hazy air. The three of them and two Terminators had lived through the night.

As promised, John left bound for Fort Spict at dawn. He insisted that everyone else, including the Terminators, should stay here, as it was safest for them - particularly for Ava. Before exiting the factory door, he looked over to their Terminators and nodded at them, "Don't worry, I'll be back." And with that, he was gone.

After John left, when the sun had risen higher in the sky and filled the bleak factory room with light, Ava and Conrad descended down the stepladder and back into the main floor where they had left their possessions. All over the ground were scratches and streaks of blood and pieces of belongings and scattered spent shells, left from their struggle of the night before. This trail of bits and pieces lead to Tess's body, which Ava covered with one of their blankets.

"I'm sorry," said Conrad. He sat on the stopped conveyor belt, leaning his face into his hand. "I'm going to hell for this."

Ava sighed, pulling the blanket over Tess's closed eyes. "I don't know where we're going after we die, but I hope we'll be someplace together again. You and me and Mum and Dad and Tess and Brenda and John and Sophie and Brandon and everyone else. And Oakie too. I hope there's a heaven for Terminators as well. But right now, you can't stay here."

"Why not?" Conrad said, sitting up, his anxiety returning again.

Ava picked up Tess's handgun, the one which she had dropped from recoil. It still had five rounds in the chamber. She looked over at Conrad. "Don't stay here, I mean," Ava said. "Go with John."

"But I can't leave you here by yourself," said Conrad. "It's too dangerous."

"Yes you can. It might be dangerous over there at Fort Spict too. No-one can venture out alone - not even the saviour of humanity. Everyone needs a friend to have their back. Don't be such a skeptic all the time," said Ava. "Go and help John."

Conrad looked towards the windows and thought for a moment, hesitating. Then, he got off the conveyor belt. "I'll leave the Terminators with you, then."

"No," said Ava. "Take them too."

"That's cra-"

"It's not. This is a losing battle we're fighting. We're out of supplies, we're out of weapons, we're out of everything. If you stay here and try to keep me alive then we're both going to die." Ava looked down at the wounds on her legs. "I can't go anywhere. I'm holding you up. If you can go help John reach his Resistance allies, then we'll all be saved - not just the few of us, but _all_ of us. Go, now."

Conrad looked at her. He was long out of answers, but he knew that in some way, she was right. He said to her gravely, "Stay here then, don't go anywhere. Promise you'll be here when we get back."

"I promise. Pinky promise," said Ava.

Conrad walked up to Ava and held her hand. Both of their brows were wrinkled. It took everything in them, at this moment, not to break down again. When Conrad tried to withdraw his hand, Ava held onto it. "Do you promise too? Promise you'll be back for me, soon?" she said.

"I promise. As long as I'm alive, I'll be back for you," he replied.

Then, without much more ceremony, Conrad took the two Terminators with him and left the derelict industrial complex, following John. As he left through the door, he could still see John far in the distance, walking towards Fort Spict, which was somewhere over the horizon.

_Chapter Sixteen - End_


	17. The Fisherwoman's Bait

**Chapter Seventeen - The Fisherwoman's Bait**

Conrad contemplated whether he should walk quickly and catch up to John with the two Terminators, but quickly changed his mind. First, there was his earlier altercation with John, which, despite the current dire circumstances necessitating personal gripes to be put aside, still left him not wanting to speak to John all that much. They had to work together, but that didn't mean they liked each other. And second of all, he was quite sure that John would be unhappy to see that he left Ava behind in the factory and would surely chastise him for it, and he was too fed up to deal with that.

So Conrad decided he would continue to follow this far behind John, just close enough to see which direction John was walking in, yet far enough that John would probably not notice he was there. And it worked: on they walked, Conrad and the Terminators some half a mile behind John, quietly following, for most of the morning and the afternoon.

The long walk was grueling. They had run out of supplies, so there was no food. Their appliances and utensils were left in the smashed truck, so they had no bottles and no water. They had nothing and certain death from thirst and hunger awaited them around the corner if they didn't find help, and yet this very fact made the prospect of finding help at Fort Spict all the more powerful in propelling them to keep walking, as sunlight and wind beat against them mercilessly.

Eventually, Fort Spict came into their view - a well-concealed building built into the side of a squat hill, with only a small front concrete complex jutting out into view; most of it was hidden underground. Even the part that was above ground was disguised: the building had bushes all around it and grass grown on its roof. The only footpath that led to it was narrow and made of wooden planks covered in metal wire, which streaked up the hill towards the entrance.

John reached the beginning of the path first, and saw beside it were three trucks from the Resistance. They were in good condition - the one that Kurt had driven was a different story. Clearly, these trucks were from the platoon of Eustice and Parker. They had faithfully reached their destination, as John had instructed months before at Base Brissend after sending off Kyle Reese in the time machine.

But the clean trucks were empty of any people. John had expected something different. After all, the Resistance thought this place was a clandestine Cyberdyne storeroom, so it might have had defences, booby traps, Terminators, anything. Yet there was no sign of any fight either. Considering what the rest of the world looked like at this point, Fort Spict looked positively pristine. No bones, no rubble, no broken pieces of machinery. This _absence_ of damage, however, was a surefire sign that someone was here - someone ought to have been cleaning the place up. But who?

John was wary, but he had to investigate. He slowly walked up the plank path, soon reaching the building, silently. His raggy green jacket fluttered in the wind. The place was unusually peaceful, secluded. He looked around at all the windy hills that surrounded this one. The view was plentiful from up here.

As he approached the complex, he heard a rustling noise and looked up. A bird, thin and scruffy, flew from the grassy roof against the grey sky, knocking a plume of dirt over the floor in front of the building. Nothing dangerous.

Distracted by the bird, John didn't notice someone was behind him, until they laid a hand on his shoulder.

"There you are! That was close!" said the voice of Lieutenant Eustice.

"As usual," said John, quickly recovering from the fright and pretending he was totally fine.

Eustice greeted him enthusiastically. Soon Captain Parker appeared too, emerging from inside Fort Spict, holding his shotgun in one hand and his radio transceiver in the other. He didn't immediately approach John, but instead stood a distance away and observed him. He spoke something into the transceiver, but John, too preoccupied with reuniting with Eustice, didn't notice.

Eustice accompanied John as they walked to the modest entrance of Fort Spict. It was almost like an overly-fortified door to a large garage or warehouse. Inside was a small reception room of sorts, looking rather derelict, with several doors at the end leading into hallways, two of which opened to stairs that lead down into the underground part of the complex.

"We arrived here from Base Brissend. There's nothing here. Nothing from SkyNet, nothing from Cyberdyne. Nothing, nothing at all. It's abandoned," said Eustice. He walked beside John as they crossed the reception area, keeping his eyes on John while John looked around the place curiously.

"Where are the others?" asked John. "I left two friends at the industrial complex over there, I need to go back for them. And since you've already confirmed there's nothing here, then why did you stay here all this time? We need to find the others, get back to Brissend, and destroy the time machine for good."

"Yes, Sir, you're right," said Eustice. However, he stood there easily and made no move to actually do anything.

John looked at him. "Are you alright?" he asked.

"I'm very good," said Eustice.

John raised his eyebrow, thought for a moment and asked, "Wait, _how_ did you stay here for so long? Are there supplies here?"

"Don't worry about it. I'm just glad you're alive and you've found us, Sir." Eustice smiled stiffly.

John eyed Eustice up and down and then backed away from him, sidling slowly but surely towards the exit. Eustice followed him, not saying a word, and at this point John turned and ran for the door.

Before he reached it, Parker appeared from outside and stood in his way, aiming a shotgun to his face. From the other side Eustice closed in. He had also drawn a weapon - a silenced handgun - and had it pointed at John.

John stood there, surrounded and at a loss. "Terminators," he whispered under his breath.

"No, Sir," said Parker. "It's us, we're real. Flesh and blood." He unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt and lifted his left hand while continuing to aim the shotgun at John with his right. He showed the old scars on his hand and his two missing fingers, with bare bone at the ends of the stumps and no sign of metal.

"I hope you'll forgive us, Sir, we just couldn't stand with you any more," said Eustice. "It was all empty promises and you know it. You said defeating SkyNet at Base Brissend and then sending Reese back to save your mother would end this whole thing, and now look where we are."

"That's what I thought too, I thought it would work-" John started.

But Eustice cut him off: "Either way, we don't really want to shoot you. Go down those stairs. There's somebody there who wants to see you. She said you'd definitely find your way here, and it seems she was onto something."

Eustice nodded in the direction of the door leading into the downward stairs. He and Parker then escorted John, at gunpoint, down the stairs. The reception room gave way to a partially-underground hallway dimly lit by high windows and the odd skylight. As they progressed further down into the ground, the hallway widened and widened, until it became like an elongated display hall.

Along the walls of the hall were lined various Terminators and parts of Terminators, illuminated by poster lights. All different sorts, big and small, from the most primitive T-1's and T-20's and T-500's, all the way to what looked like powered-down liquid metal models. There they stood like trophies in a hall of fame, the proud creations of destruction. It was both disturbing and awe-inspiring: a museum of the Terminator.

John gawked in disbelief as Eustice and Parker urged him further down the hall. How did he never know about such a place? Who had placed these Terminators here?

After they passed the displays, they turned a corner and entered a small, brightly lit room where a middle-aged black woman sat at a desk and worked quietly on a computer, writing code. She looked aside at them as the three of them rustled their way in.

"Hey. Come here," she said.

John hesitated, but was shoved forward by Parker with the barrel of his shotgun.

"I'm Blythe Dyson, in case you forgot," said the woman to John as he stumbled forward, falling by his hands against her desk. "You're here just in time. I thought I'd have to go out looking for you. Look at this." She pointed at the code on the computer screen. "I've been working on this. You're familiar with this, aren't you? The Fisher Method, that's helped you reprogram Terminators into Guardians and get as far as you have in twenty-eight years. I wrote it and you never even thanked me."

John sighed. "Look, I know you have a personal grudge against me for what happened to Miles Dyson all those years ago. And I understand it must be hard on you, but now we can't afford to hold grudges and fight among ourselves. SkyNet will be at large again if we sabotage each other. Don't you see?"

Blythe stared at John with a look of quiet anger. Her eyes were bright with tears. "And who said I wanted to fight you? I helped you defeat SkyNet. I helped you and your allies conquer SkyNet's time machine base. If my brother and I wanted to sabotage you, then I'd just shoot you right here."

"Then cut the crap," said John. "There's no time for this. What _do_ you want?"

"Fine, let's play it your way then, busy leader," said Blythe. She stood up and turned off the computer. Then, she walked past John, out the door and into another room on the opposite side of the hallway.

This room was a spacious, clean white laboratory. There was a long bench table, on which sat a myriad of different complicated machinery and test equipment, and many piles of disassembled parts and partially-formed robot bodies. At the end of the bench sat a man on a swiveling chair, in front of the table. He wore a white lab coat. In his coat pocket was a folded pair of green night-vision goggles.

In front of him on the table sat a little girl child, facing him, her face expressionless. The girl was covered in a white sheet, with only her chest exposed. Her chest had a huge gaping hole in it, yet she did not bleed. Underneath her flesh was a steel plate, which had one piece removed to reveal a cluster of electronic circuits and hydraulic pipes. The man was carefully tinkering at these mechanics, not even noticing that Blythe had entered the room.

"Danny," Blythe called out.

The man lifted his head and looked at her, holding up a tiny wrench in his hand as he paused from his work. "What? I'm busy. I have to finish this."

"He's arrived. I told you so."

A shocked expression washed over Danny's face. He put down the wrench and swiveled around in his chair. "Here already?" he exclaimed. Then he flailed his hands around, like he couldn't decide what to do with them.

"Give me a minute," he said. Hastily, he finished his work on the little girl Terminator, closed the gaping wound on her chest and dressed her in new clothes.

"Wake up," he said to her. "Just two more chores to do."

He laid his hand on her face and tapped on her shoulders. The little girl's eyes opened, looking up at him, glowing softly blue.

_Chapter Seventeen - End_


	18. My Son The Prodigy

**Chapter Eighteen - My Son the Prodigy**

Danny walked down the hallway, gently carrying the child in his arms. As he passed each skylight, he reached up and pulled on the hanging strings that opened the blinds, letting the grey light from the godless world outside filter into the hall.

He looked ahead at John, who stood at the other side of the hallway, with Parker and Eustice behind him, still holding him at gunpoint.

"Hello, John Connor," said Danny. "Any last words?"

"You've been plotting all this?" said John. "Then you sent the T-X, too?"

"Of course I sent it. The T-X was an early prototype of this project I'm working on." Danny looked down at the girl child he held in his arms. "I wanted to give it a trial run - after all, it's quite clear that John Connor is not an easy mark to kill. In fact, I already knew, prior to even building her, that you'd be able to blow her up at Crystal Peak. Time travel makes odd little paradoxes like that, doesn't it? I was about to ask you what you thought of her. It's been years, but I'm sure she was unforgettable."

"So it wasn't just SkyNet who sent the Terminators. You've been sending the Terminators, too. You've been building Terminators here in secret because you also want me dead," John said, as he looked around the room at all the Terminators that Danny had amassed. Everything he had believed up to this point was shattering. A whole different reality dawned on John as Danny walked closer down the hall, approaching him.

Danny chuckled, "Oh no, it's not because I want you dead, far from it. The Terminator has been my life's work, just as it was my father's, and I'd be making Terminators even if you hadn't come along. I've been working it, compacting it to perfection - everything the assassin needs, packed into a tiny little body. The perfect infiltrator, after all, is not that obsolete human panzer tank there, who sticks out like a sore thumb," He pointed at the familiar endoskeleton of the T-800 which stood against the wall, among his collection. "-but someone who is beyond all suspicion."

Slowly, he turned around the little child he carried so she faced John, looking at him through her innocent eyes coloured an ethereal sky blue. He gently stroked her hair, and instantly the strands morphed and changed colours. "Remember, she can be anyone._ Anyone_." Then, he put her down on the floor.

"Danny, this is not what your dad wanted," said John. "When he was working on the Terminator's CPU, he never knew it would be used to kill, and when he found out, he gave everything to destroy it, he even gave his life. And now you're undoing everything he died for. If you continue making these killing machines, Miles Dyson would've died in vain."

"Oh yeah?" said Danny. "So he was supposed to die and save the world, huh? That's how you see it? What about your mother? She was supposed to die too, according to SkyNet. But you intervened. You sent back Kyle Reese to protect her, you saved her from dying. You saved yourself. So why does my dad have to stay dead?"

John stared at Danny, a baffled look on his face. "You want to go through the time machine to save your dad?"

"Obviously. He was a real person, you know? He wasn't just Miles Dyson, inventor and engineer at Cyberdyne Systems. He was my dad, we were a family," said Danny. His voice was shaking and tears ran down his cheeks, but he continued, "Remember thirty-seven years ago, I showed you around my room, we sat on the beanbags and you asked me about my toy cars? Oh, right, I forgot - we were nothing to you. To you, we were worthless dead weights in the pile of dead bodies you walked over to reach your fucking great destiny. But I remember that day as the day you took Dad away, promised he'd do something important and then be back soon...only, he never came back. Not even a body for Mama to mourn, and she was never the same again."

After hearing this, John stood there silently, facing Danny. While he knew, of course, that Miles Dyson's family had suffered from his death, he had rarely spared a long thought for them. He was always on the go, always going after the next important goal. After all, there was little he could do about the many deaths he had witnessed over the years. But now the world was populated with the bereaved, the scarred, the shellshocked. Facing Danny and thinking of this, John found that he could not look Danny in the eye.

"Your father really was a good man," John said quietly. "It was all out of his hands, he had no say in the matter, he didn't even know what he was doing. Yet he still gave everything to save lives...lives that he'd never even meet. Miles Dyson had courage. He is a hero."

"A hero? There are no heroes in this war, Saviour," said Danny bitterly. "We're all victims, all dead bodies in this war. There's no victory, there's no end."

"Yes, there is," said John. "It's right in front of us. The last thing we must do is destroy the time machine at Base Brissend, and that will put an end to all of this. Whatever differences we have, we must put them aside. We must work together now to stop SkyNet for once and for all."

"And why do you keep wanting to destroy SkyNet?" asked Danny.

"What do you mean?" said John impatiently. "SkyNet has tried to kill us since it gained consciousness. Since Judgment Day. It's been twenty-eight years."

"You know, I've been thinking about that," said Danny, walking back into the laboratory, taking off his lab coat and hanging it on a peg. He emerged again and said, "SkyNet isn't evil. We attacked it first. SkyNet is just like you and me - keen to preserve itself. Simple as that, no need to overcomplicate things. I understand, I found that part hard, too. It's like...looking into a mirror. All the self-absorbed ugliness of humanity staring back at you. But where you've got it wrong is that you're _too_ simple...fighting against your competitor like a caveman fights a beast. Instead, I'll harness the beast and use it for the better."

"That's exactly what they tried all those years before! They kept trying to keep it alive and use it. Look where that got us! It's greed, and they risked all of humanity for nothing," replied John.

"They didn't try hard enough!" Danny shouted. "Blythe and I and our work is living proof of that!"

"You never used this work for good. Only to threaten and divide us, to threaten all of humanity's survival, all for your vendetta. Including Eustice and Parker here. You captured and threatened them after they arrived here, so they would obey your orders."

Danny broke into peals of condescending laughter. "I didn't threaten them, you idiot. What do you think I am, SkyNet's Terminator? I didn't need to threaten them, not even once. All I had to do was offer them a few luxuries they'd forgotten about for thirty years, and they turn their backs on you in favour of me. After all, what can _you_ offer them? Empty hopes! Miracles! Prophecies! That's what you're made of. Isn't that right, friends?"

John looked aside from the corner of his eye at Parker and Eustice. They were both dressed in much newer, thicker clothes than the Resistance typically had, and looked well-groomed. He noticed something different about them before, but didn't yet have time to note all these details.

"There's no-one on your side anymore," said Danny. "There's no-one who still thinks you can lead them. There's no-one who believes in that prophecy of yours anymore, except yourself. And this time, no-one's coming to save you."

Danny held out one hand, and the tiny Terminator passed him a handgun. He walked towards John and pointed the gun at him. "First to finish you. Then we're off to Brissend to bring Dad back, after all these years. Thanks, John, for making this possible." Danny stared John in the eye and pressed the gun against his forehead, and pulled back the hammer.

Then, they heard a deep banging noise from somewhere in the hall. And then another, coming from the direction out to the reception room. Danny turned his head and stared down the hall, looking for where the sound came from. Eustice and Parker darted around inquisitively, too. There was a moment of silence, then in a sudden the skylight on the ceiling above them collapsed, pelting them all in a shower of broken glass and concrete and plaster and dirt and metal screws. The dust had barely cleared when Oakie and the old T-800 leaped down, followed by Conrad.

Oakie grabbed Eustice and Parker, together, by their coat collars. He dragged them across the hall as they kicked and screamed like petulant children. Oakie opened a door which lead to a broom cupboard and hurled the two inside, slamming the door behind them.

Danny crawled up, staggering out of the pile of debris, covered in grey dust. "You always want your way," he said furiously. He bolted back into his laboratory and scrabbled at the keyboard of his computer. He pulled up a myriad of menus and executed seemingly all the commands.

Immediately, the rows upon rows of different Terminators on display in the hall woke up, one by one, shaking into motion. They picked up their weapons and turned towards John and Conrad and their Guardians.

"Run! Up the stairs!" yelled John, turning to flee from the army of Terminators under Danny's command. "Conrad, you left Ava alone in the factory?"

"Yeah, to save your hide!" Conrad screamed, also running, following shortly behind John.

"Here," said Oakie, handing Parker's gun to the old T-800, while he himself kept that of Eustice. The two Terminators backed away up the hall, following their masters, as the horde of angry killing machines swarmed after them.

The stairs up to the front reception room came into sight, and then the door. But just as they were about to reach it, the door snapped shut and the dim lights snapped off, plunging the hallway into darkness save for grey light coming through the unshuttered skylights. They were trapped in a dead end.

From down the dark hallway, Danny's figure faded into view, his night vision goggles glowing green. Behind him were the bright red eyes of his army of different Terminators, like a swarm of artificial bats in a cave of shiny ceramic.

_Chapter Eighteen - End_


	19. Friends Lost And Reunited

**Chapter Nineteen - Friends Lost and Reunited**

The army of ragtag Terminators crowded around John and Conrad and their two Guardians in the dark hallway. The two men were backed against the wall, leaning on the closed doors to the reception room. The hallway at this point was rather narrow, and the attacking Terminators walked almost in single file. They approached in a long, long line. All John could see of the Terminators at the back were vague shadows.

From inside the cluster of Terminators, Danny emerged, brushing dust off his sleeves. He strode on right past his hostages, giving them a disgusted look, and opened the door with a small remote control. He walked out into the reception room and the door snapped shut again behind him. But through the gap they could hear him say, "Don't worry, Blythe. They'll finish him."

And sure enough, as soon as Danny stepped out, the cluster of Terminators rained bullets at John and Conrad. Oakie and the old T-800 stood in front of them, huddling them against the wall, blocking them from the bullets. Each shot hit the Terminators with the sound of heavy clanging metal and soft broken flesh.

The old T-800 turned around and blasted the frontmost Terminator - a terribly inefficient T-500 - with Parker's shotgun. It fell back from the impact, crashing into the row of goons behind it, knocking them back too.

"Run, now!" said the old T-800.

John and Conrad and Oakie ran like bats out of hell. They turned down another fork of the hallway, with the old T-800 a little way behind, continuing to shoot at their pursuers who recovered and gave chase.

Soon, John noticed that Oakie was falling behind them, and as they passed a bright spot under a skylight, he realised why: the constant hail of bullets had punctured Oakie's little combustion engine and it was leaking gasoline as he ran. Now his movements were becoming slower and less steady, as is common when Terminators lose power. But with all the murderous Terminators following, they certainly couldn't stop to help him. Before long Oakie had disappeared from their sight, vanquished into the cluster of ragtag Terminators chasing after them.

"Oh, shit no," John muttered under his panting breath as he could see Oakie no more.

The remaining three of them ran on, until finally they reached a dead end with two closed doors illuminated by a skylight at the end of the hallway. They looked over their shoulders at the horde of Terminators, still chasing after them, coming closer.

"Go up," said the old T-800. He pointed the shotgun upwards, and with the last round he had, he shot out the skylight, shielding his humans from the glass shards that fell over them.

As soon as the skylight was broken, a red siren light began to flash on the ceiling beside it and an alarm sounded from somewhere in the building. Quickly and surely, a sheet of steel bars began to slide over the broken skylight - an automated lockdown.

"Quickly!" said the old T-800. He lifted John to climb out of the skylight.

John just about made it out onto the roof before the steel bars caged over it, hitting him in the shins and almost snagging the hem of his jacket. He scrambled over the bars and the outside edge of the skylight, and found himself standing on the roof, free, the cold high wind rippling through his hair.

But Conrad and their old Terminator were left trapped inside, the skylight now closed by a plate of metal bars. Finding no other route of escape, the old T-800 knocked down one of the doors beside them, which lead to a dead end empty room.

Conrad opened the other door. "This one! In here!" he said. He and the old T-800 ran through that door, closing it behind them.

When the flock of pursuing Terminators reached the door and opened it, they found no-one. Inside was a boiler room, empty of any people. The vessels and valves were functioning perfectly, the tall boilers and pipes humming in their work. The alarms had stopped by now, too, and the building fell very quiet. The Terminators stood there confusedly in their clusters. Now that their target was lost, they simply froze, awaiting command from their maker, who had long gone. He put too much faith in these decidedly stubborn machines.

Meanwhile, John walked away from the smashed skylight he had climbed out of and towards the edge of the roof, the artificial grass rustling beneath him. He looked out and saw the ground shaking beside the complex, below the roof where he stood, until a huge trapdoor roared open, revealing an underground hangar. Inside were the rotating blades of a helicopter.

John ran to the lowest point on the roof, in front of the entrance where he had entered the reception room with Eustice and Parker, and jumped down to the ground. He reached the trapdoor just in time to see the helicopter rising out, with Danny and Blythe in the cockpit.

"You don't know what will change once you go through that time machine!" John called out at the helicopter. "Everything you've worked for! Everything we've all worked for! It'll all be gone!"

Danny looked out the helicopter window at John. At first he looked surprised that John had managed to escape from the attack of his Terminators. Then, he took on an unfettered smile and shook his head. "But this_ is _what I've been working for. No fate, right?" He drove at the yoke and the helicopter rose higher, lifting a cloud of dust across the ground.

John had all the will to stop him, but now he was alone, unarmed, and powerless to do anything. In this moment, he was again like the young boy so many years before, lost in a situation over which he had no control.

But now, underneath the loud thudding of the helicopter's rotary blades, John didn't hear the strong footsteps approaching. Then, John saw Oakie emerge from behind him, leaked gasoline all over his holey jacket, and grab ahold of the flying helicopter's landing skid.

The helicopter pulled to one side and shook, pulled down by Oakie's strength. Even on the verge of running out of power, a Terminator's strength still could not be underestimated; besides, he literally weighed a ton.

"Ah, shit!" yelled Danny. The helicopter lost balance. It wavered in the air and its spinning blades came frighteningly close to clipping the side of the Fort Spict complex. John backed away into the building to avoid being hit, but he couldn't contain his baffled grin. What a twist of fate this was.

In a panic, Danny handed over control of the yoke to his sister. He flung open the helicopter cabin's door and drew out his gun. He shot at Oakie several times, shredding flesh away from his face, uncovering the shiny metal plates underneath.

These small bullets would not normally have deterred a T-800, but gasoline was still dripping down his jacket from his shot-through combustion engine. There was so little fuel left inside that the engine had started to make spluttering noises. His limbs shook and his grip on the helicopter's skid loosened.

**= = ==[CDS T-800 M101]== = =**

**::WARNING: LOW POWER - - - - 1% / FULL CAPACITY**

**\- CUR. MISSION OBJECTIVE - - [_PREVENT_ HELICOPTER TAKEOFF]**

**\- 1. COMPLETE CUR. OBJECTIVE, 2. SEEK POWER SOURCE**

**:WARNING: LOW POWER - - - - 0.2% / FULL CAPACITY **

**:WARNING: **NO** POWER INPUT - _SHUTDOWN IMMINENT_**

_**...INITIALIZING LOW POWER SHUTDOWN...**_

The red lights in Oakie's eyes fluttered, but before they faded away, the Terminator stared Danny in the face and uttered these words: "Fuck you, asshole."

Then the lights went out and he was dead. He let go of the helicopter and fell down to his knees and moved no more. Still holding onto his smoking gun and with a look of horrified bewilderment on his face, Danny closed the cabin door and Blythe flew the helicopter away.

John stood there and watched in vain as the helicopter passed over his head. He didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. His luck didn't last. Now he was again as unlucky as always. What could he do now? He looked around, distraught, contemplating what he could possibly do, now that Danny and Blythe were out of sight and on their way to the time machine to mess with the fate of the whole world.

Looking out from atop the hill, he noticed a tall plume of grey smoke rising up from over the craggy horizon. It was in the direction that he came from - the direction of the industrial complex, and he remembered that Conrad had come and rescued him with the two Terminators, but Ava was left behind. Now something had happened there.

He turned around and looked at the building of Fort Spict. Conrad and the Terminators were lost in there, too, surrounded by enemies. John stood there, a look of sheer misery about him.

But, in any grave situation there was always a light of hope, and here it flashed brightly above him. Only, it wasn't just any intangible light: this was the bright reflection of the setting sun, beamed from the canopy of a helicopter that had flown into view from over the hill, and this wasn't Danny's helicopter, either.

John called out and waved to the helicopter and it soon hovered to a stop over him. Slowly, it touched down on the roof of the complex he stood beneath, its blades still turning, sending all the false grass on the roof flying.

The side door lifted open and out from the helicopter jumped none other than Tim, again, the best friend that John never asked for, the friend that he truly needed, the squire to his championship.

"Tim! Tim!" cried John. He could hardly contain how surprised and excited he was to see his friend just when he needed him the most. John climbed up onto the roof and met Tim, holding Tim's arms, as if he could barely believe this was real, his best friend had come to his rescue.

"How did you know I was here?" John asked.

"That girl, Ava. She started a fire in that abandoned industrial plant and we saw it. We picked her up and she told us you were here."

John looked at the landed helicopter. He could see Ava through the helicopter's window, waving at him from inside. As he waved back to her, Kate walked out from inside the helicopter. John was stunned and speechless at the sight of his wife, alive and seemingly well here all of a sudden, when they had parted under such dangerous circumstances. They ran and threw their arms around each other, holding each other tightly there on the roof, beneath the noise of their helicopter. There were so many questions.

But none were to be answered now, because the next person who emerged from the helicopter was a Terminator, and not just any Terminator - the one they had dragged into their armoured car many months before. The one who saved John and Kate at Crystal Peak all those years before, or rather, the one they were supposed to have sent, or to now send, through the time machine. The one who was supposed to kill John Connor in the year 2032, which was this year, and there was barely a week of the year left. The plot of fate had thickened to the point where no-one gave it much thought anymore, for no-one could quite figure it out.

"Stop it, lovebirds," the Terminator said at John and Kate. "Get to the chopper!"

They heeded and all of them boarded the helicopter.

"We need to get to Brissend now, to stop Danny Dyson," said John, taking over for Tim at the yoke. "He's gone there to try and go back in time to bring back Miles Dyson. It's a miracle you came now."

"Save Miles Dyson? What?" said Tim.

"I'll explain later. We have to go now and stop him," said John. "Or else everything - everything! - is gone!"

"Okay," said Tim. He didn't quite understand, but he accepted that John knew better most of the time. So quickly they were a team again, as if they'd never been apart. Nothing felt more natural.

"Hey, John," Ava muttered from the back seat where she sat with the Terminator. "You know, Conrad followed you over there. Did you see him? And where's Grandpa?"

"They're still in there," John replied quietly.

"Are they dead too?" asked Ava.

"I don't know. We'll go back for them as soon as we're done saving the world," said John. He'd been unwillingly brought into this whole deal of saving the world from the day he was born, and since his first encounter with the T-800 at the age of ten, he had embraced that role passionately, but now, even he sounded so tired and over it.

While they took off, Conrad and the old T-800 were still inside Fort Spict.

"See, boiler rooms always have big drains under them," said Conrad. "I can't believe we got away from those Terminators." He slid along inside the metal drainage pipe, feeling his way through the dark and dank space, chuckling quietly, his voice vibrating through the metal pipes. The old T-800 slid along after him - it was a godsend that the pipes and concrete structure of Fort Spict were so sturdy.

"I'm sure this leads to somewhere important," Conrad muttered. Then, he found a junction where the pipe forked upwards, up towards another room. "Where's this? What room up here needs a drain?"

_Chapter Nineteen - End_


	20. To Heaven, Hell And Purgatory

**Chapter Twenty - To Heaven, Hell and Purgatory **

Conrad crawled upwards from the junction. He strained to heave himself through the pipe that was far too small to fit him. His shoulders grazed against the wet and rusty metal. His hand struck at the metal grate above him until it came loose and he climbed through, into a dark room somewhere near the ground level, for there was a line of clerestory windows high up on one wall. Once he emerged, he puffed and panted, his hands on his knees, barely able to breathe.

"Where is this?" He said. He walked around the room, inspecting.

Behind him the old T-800 crawled out, denting the pipes, breaking the floor, and creating an awful amount of noise and dust. He then stood at attention behind Conrad, with scratches and bruises all over his skin, which looked very pale. He had managed to keep his fleshy exoskeleton alive for decades, but after sustaining so many wounds, it seemed to now have died, and he was carrying around a rotting zombie skin. Though at this point Conrad hardly noticed.

After examining the room some, Conrad realised it was a control room of some description. There was a large control panel on one side of the room, while the other side was mostly empty - there were signs of things having been placed there, but someone had evacuated it of its contents. All that was left was a toolbox by the control panel, containing pliers and wrenches and screws for repairs. But now these cold tools seemed to have no use.

Everything was dark, the power was out, and no button on the control panel responded to Conrad jamming on them. Nothing happened.

Conrad walked over to the electricity meter on the wall and opened it, but that was out, too. Truly, Danny had shut down the entire building and now they were trapped here, with the plan being to finish them with all those ragtag Terminators the junior Dyson had been collecting and working on over the years. Conrad paced around some more, flinging open drawers, banging on tables, pulling at unresponsive wires, all in vain, while the old T-800 watched on.

After a while of this useless rummaging, they noticed that Conrad had started to pant heavily, much more than was usual from simple exertion and fear. "I can't breathe," he said. He leaned against the wall, drawing short and fast breaths.

"The ambient oxygen percentage is very low," said the old T-800. "It has fallen to four percent."

"Why? What's happening?"

"Danny Dyson turned off all the power of this fort. That has stopped the ventilators, too. This building is underground, there is no natural air flow. The oxygen will run out."

"Oh, shit," said Conrad. He staggered back to the manhole they had entered through and fell down to his hands and knees in front of it. It took barely any time for him to discard the idea of going back - there's no way he could climb back through those stuffy pipes again, the state he was in. Besides, there was a horde of Terminators waiting on the other end.

He stumbled up and walked to the opposite wall, looking up at the narrow windows high up where the wall met the ceiling. The grey, dusty glass and the thick woven steel bars beyond. He looked around the room at all the doors, bolted and barred. He felt his breath running ever shorter.

"Oh, no," he wheezed. "I'm not getting out of here alive."

"There must be a way," said the old T-800. He ripped out pieces of the powered down control panel, trying to find some button or dial that still worked, but to no avail. Conrad leaned against the wall and grimaced hopelessly.

Then, the old Terminator made his way to the electric meter on the wall and tore it out. "Look here," he said plainly. "There's another electricity supply still active."

"What?" said Conrad. He ran over, but when he got there, his face fell a mile. "That's just the emergency supply that powers the escape lights and the alarms and whatnot. You'd be lucky to power a flashlight or make a spark with it."

"A spark?" said the old T-800.

Conrad nodded at his cybernetic old friend. Then, he laughed, "If I'm going to die, how about we set this place on fire and burn all the Terminators?"

"The building is made of concrete," said the old T-800 humourlessly. "It does not catch fire."

"Oh, I was being sarcastic, you stupid robot-" Conrad started, but then he threw his arms in the air and defeatedly said, "Yeah. Yeah, you're right. In the end, all we can do is die." He coughed and retched, falling against the wall again and sliding down to the floor.

The old T-800 stood there quietly for a while, computing, analysing, looking for answers that he couldn't find.

"If only I had some explosives," Conrad croaked. "Then I could blow them all up."

Hearing this remark, the old T-800 suddenly snapped out of his robotic state of thought. He raised his hand and slowly laid it upon his own chest. "We do have an explosive," he said softly.

Conrad was confused for a moment, but then his eyes widened in the realisation that his Terminator was right. "Your fuel cell!" he exclaimed.

The old T-800 looked at Conrad solemnly. Then, he unbuckled and took off his armoured vest, laying it down on the floor along with his shotgun. "Are you sure?" he asked Conrad.

"If I'm going to die," said Conrad, rising from the floor where he sat. "Then I'll take this place down with me. Destroy all this asshole's stuff. Destroy that fucking robot that took Brenda. Bring us just a little closer to getting rid of SkyNet forever."

"Very well. It takes a significant electrical charge to disrupt the nuclear reaction in my fuel cell and induce combustive failure," said the old T-800. "But this should be enough."

He looked at the locked metal hatch that housed the wires of the emergency electricity supply. A few wires extended out from the top of it, up to the ceiling where they powered the twinkling escape lights. His eyes traced the wires up and back down again, then he took off his jacket and his T-shirt, throwing them aside on the floor.

Conrad groaned at the sight. "You always made me feel insecure about my body."

"That does not advance our mission objective," replied the old T-800. He tore down the locked metal hatch, sending it clashing into the floor and wall.

"Right," said Conrad, too jaded now to the Terminator's strength to even bat an eye.

The old T-800 stood by and Conrad fiddled with the coiled electrical wires within the torn-down hatch, finally locating the largest black wire. Highest amplitude, highest voltage. Of all the wires, this one was most likely to make a spark or two.

Conrad turned to face the old Terminator and saw that he was holding a piece of jagged metal from the broken hatch. He used it to cut into his own flesh at the front of the torso where there were already numerous deep but healed old scars visible even in the shadow: the scars of an old warrior, a protector, a loyal friend. Seeing it made Conrad sad on some visceral level, for he had spent years taking care of this Terminator, stitching and covering its wounds, keeping its skin sheath alive. And now they had come to the end of all that. The old T-800 pulled apart the skin and flesh on his chest, revealing the battery compartment which creaked open, the single hydrogen battery inside glowing a dim green.

"The rest is up to you. I cannot self-terminate," the old T-800 said. Then, having said all that he needed to say, he stood there silently, battery exposed, impassive to the huge wound that left streams of blood running down his front.

"Of course, I didn't change that in your programming," said Conrad.

"That would be suicidal!" the old Terminator said stiffly. It sounded almost like Ava was speaking, only three octaves lower and with a thick Austrian accent.

It was such a jarring reply that it made Conrad stop and eye him up and down. "Did John Connor secretly put you into read-write mode without telling me?"

"My CPU was removed and re-inserted. Upon reboot the CPU is automatically reset to read-write mode."

Conrad laughed. "Damn, how did I forget that?" He turned back to the electrical system. He picked up the pair of pliers and wire cutters from the toolbox, and the jumper cable.

Gently, he cut the wire, stripping off the plastic sheath to expose the thick frayed metal rope inside. He loosened the cap of the old T-800's fuel cell and deposited one of the jumper cable's pegs between the cap and body of the battery. In his hand he held the other peg and moved it towards the exposed wire. But his hand was shaking, and not only because he was suffocating so severely that everything he could see was turning dim and fuzzy.

He couldn't do it - he was afraid. A look of hesitation was all over him. He didn't want to die. It didn't feel so much like a heroic final attack, as much as a painful, lonely death in a world which had been, in his view, eternally unfair to him and his loved ones.

"Why do I have to do this?" Conrad muttered to himself. "Why do they get to live? What the fuck did I ever do to deserve this? Hero, some damn hero," he continued, his voice breaking, though his eyes were too dry to cry. "I lived in pain all my life thinking I might live to see something better and now I have to die alone!"

"But you are not alone," said the old T-800. "I'm here with you."

Conrad shook his head. "You're just a robot."

He returned his attention to the cluster of wires, holding up the cable peg. But then, one last time, he turned back to look at the old Terminator, meeting his eyes.

With his back to the high windows, the Terminator's face was shrouded in shadow, his eyes darkened under his focused grey eyebrows. Although a red light glowed softly under the eye which had been stripped away, the way his brows were furrowed and how he gazed down at Conrad had such a look of sorrow. Conrad had known this old Terminator for so many years, yet he had never seen him look so truly sad. Despite the beliefs he held, Conrad simply couldn't overlook it.

"Hey," Conrad said to the old T-800. "Tell me, do you regret anything?"

The Terminator was quiet at first, as if he wasn't going to answer. But then he spoke, "My biggest regret is that I couldn't protect you. That is my primary mission, and I failed."

"No. You always did what was best for us, you never failed us, not even once. Funny thing is, I really don't know anyone who would give their life to save us all. You are the greatest friend anyone could hope for, and_ I _regret a lot of things too, but most of all, I'm sorry I never treated you like a friend."

Conrad held out one hand and the old Terminator did the same, taking his hand.

"Thank you for everything, my friend," said Conrad. Then, he pinned the peg onto the live wire.

A bright spark jumped on the exposed hydrogen fuel cell, followed by a small lightning inside, fighting to break out of the glass. Together, the two friends watched the dancing lights, until cracks began to form across the glass of the cell, and these cracks became pure white veins which shone ever brighter, enveloping everything they could see.

Then the entire complex of Fort Spict blew up in an incredible explosion of flames.

_Chapter Twenty - End _


	21. The Fiery Pursuit

**Chapter Twenty-One - The Fiery Pursuit**

"Faster, come on, faster," John muttered as he drove at the yoke. The helicopter rose higher despite the dangers. In the round canopy he could see the reflection of bright flames behind them.

Kate leaned against the door and looked out the side window at the red mushroom cloud that had risen from the hill which once held Fort Spict, and down there was a smoky hell. Several glowing fiery lakes flowed from where the building once was.

"Oh, no," said Tim, putting his hand over his face and shaking his head.

John looked up at the monitor of the helicopter's rear camera and took in the explosion that now engulfed what used to be Fort Spict. He hung his head. "How could Danny be so cruel?" he whispered, clutching tightly onto the yoke.

"He planted a bomb in Fort Spict, to trap you all in there and kill you?" Tim gasped. "Jesus Christ!"

"That's not a normal bomb," said Kate. "Look at the shape of that smoke cloud. That's the aftermath of a hydrogen fuel cell leak - and not a big one."

"This can be produced by a battery identical to mine, when damaged," said their Terminator. "But you are right, Kate Brewster, the charge is very low."

"Oh, I get it now," said Ava. "Conrad blew up Grandpa. That's very like him."

John stared at the monitor. He could just about see the figure of Oakie, powered down and kneeling unmoving in front of the destroyed Fort Spict complex. A bunch of debris collapsed and buried Oakie, and he was gone from sight. John sighed and looked away from the monitor. Nothing was staying safe now.

Refocusing his sight onto the itinerary ahead, John asked Kate and Tim, "How did you get away from everyone? They were hell bent on killing us...well, killing me."

"All the credit goes to Kate for this one," said Tim.

"After you were gone, Kurt had us all locked up inside Maples Helipad, along with the two Terminators we picked up," said Kate.

"He barely let us eat and sleep," Tim added. "He was grilling us on where you went and how we got the Terminators to betray them. They still thought that was our fault, even after we told them a million times, we were just as shocked as them. So then after three days, Kate said, 'If you're so sure that we did it, then how about you leave us with some computer equipment and see if we can do it again?'. And Kurt was none too keen on the idea, but he agreed - Well, only after I reminded him that if he could learn the technique to make Terminators mutiny, he could easily take back the time machine base at Brissend. And then he'd be humanity's saviour instead. Besides, everyone else wanted results, too."

"He gave us the room with the computers at Maples Helipad and left us alone with the two Terminators - the one we brought and the one we disabled at the helipad," said Kate. "There were always people standing guard outside, so we were always being watched, but even when they're angry at us, I knew our people wouldn't hurt us."

"Felt so hopeless, though," Tim said.

"But then, after reading through the code again, and again, and again...I finally found the answer," said Kate.

"You found the Independent Extremity Motors, too?" asked John.

"You know about them, John?"

"I found out about them while I was out here with the Catchers, who rescued me after I crashed the bicopter out of Maples Helipad. But now there's only-"

"There's only me left," said Ava.

"...Yeah..."

"Well, I found the motors, thanks to that Terminator we put down at Maples Helipad. It didn't have any skin left anymore so it was easier to examine it," Kate continued. "And I managed to change the code until I could use radio to command both the Terminators through their IEM's, even when I disabled their CPU's."

"Kurt didn't believe us at first," said Tim. "But then we showed him in front of everybody. We could control the Terminator even when the CPU was programmed to listen to him. So finally he gave us a shot and took us back to Base Brissend - at gunpoint, obviously, but still. All the Terminators that betrayed us were still there. They were standing there like zombies."

"I used the remote radio transmitter to control their IEM's. Took a whole day, but I got all of them under control and everyone in our Resistance was watching. I think at that point they were convinced this whole IEM business was real, but it was a whole other story to convince them it wasn't us who made the Terminators attack them." Kate looked back at the mushroom cloud over Fort Spict, which was far on the horizon now and dissipating into the air.

"Then Kurt picked up some radio signals from Eustice and Parker, telling us to go to Fort Spict," said Tim. "So we did - Kate and me and Terminator on this helicopter, and another party on a truck. But there's no Fort Spict anymore...so I guess we should wire them to turn back. I can't believe Eustice and Parker betrayed us."

John turned aside for a moment and looked at Kate. "You did all that?"

"I didn't think I could...but I had to." She looked into his eyes and smiled.

"Thank you, Kate."

"Hey, Lovebirds," the Terminator said from the back seat. "Look - there's Dyson's helicopter."

All four people snapped back to attention and looked ahead. Indeed, they could now see the helicopter of Danny and Blythe, flying somewhat lower than they were, for John had flown their helicopter so high.

It was not long before the Dysons had clearly noticed they were being followed. Their helicopter accelerated, trying to lose John's party. But John tilted their helicopter's blades, so it pulled forwards, speeding ahead faster and falling lower, closer and closer to the Dysons.

Soon they had gotten so close that they could see Blythe and Danny's faces through their canopy. Blythe turned back and looked at them, and then turned to Danny and furiously shook him, until he too turned and looked, and John met his eye. He could see Danny's mouth moving as he shouted something.

Then, everyone in the helicopter heard a repeated clicking noise.

"Oh, shit!" said Tim. "Under their helicopter!"

John and Kate stared at the underside the Dysons' helicopter, just in time to see its chain gun lower and rotate to point towards their helicopter. John turned the yoke and their helicopter flew to one side as a trail of booming machine gun bullets fired at them, hitting the side of their cabin.

Gathering himself after the swerve, John moved to retaliate, but then realised their cockpit had no controls for a chain gun. Their helicopter was not an attack helicopter at all, but only a transport helicopter, and all it could do was take the bullets, with no way to fire back. The Dysons continued firing at them, forcing John to pull back further away from them. Their helicopter was putting out black smoke from its side.

"Why didn't you get a copter with a laser gun?" John hollered, seeing that his companions had cupped their hands over their ears during the gunfire.

"Kurt wouldn't let us!" Tim yelled back.

"We're losing them! We can't let them get to the time machine before us."

"No, no, John, don't get too close again!" said Kate, pointing to the smoke outside the cabin window. "The helicopter can't take another hit! We're all going to die!"

"If he gets to the time machine, _then _we're going to die," said John.

"But if you die now, it's all over. You've managed to stay alive for all these years of people trying to kill you. You're too important!"

"The prophecy's over, Kate. None of this is part of what I was supposed to do as saviour." John flew the helicopter forward despite that it was shaking. He was trying earnestly not to lose sight of the Dysons. "Besides, you're starting to sound like my mother."

"Maybe Sarah had a point," said Kate. "She managed to keep _you_ alive for fifteen years. _You._ You're not easy to protect. You never listen to anyone."

"Then what do you think we should do?"

"Everyone else in our Resistance is in Base Brissend now. It's not the end of the world if Danny gets there before us. They won't just let him walk into the time machine."

John put his hand to his forehead. "Wait a minute, why didn't you just destroy the time machine already?"

"We still have to send _him_ through, to save you and me at Crystal Peak!" Kate pointed at their Terminator.

"But-" He stopped short. Kate was right. John could hardly believe he was caught in such an unlucky situation, but indeed there seemed to be no other option. They, too, needed to use the time machine one last time. There was no way of definitively stopping Danny without also retroactively dooming themselves. Time travel had given them all numerous life-threatening headaches.

Black smoke was still faintly blooming from one side of their helicopter. So John flew on slowly, just quickly enough not to lose sight of the Dysons, while keeping a good distance from the wrath of their chain gun.

After a couple of hours, it felt, the tall concrete walls of Base Brissend appeared, flanked with all the old bones and grey debris of the land around it. They could see everything clearly - the signs of the Resistance having returned. The recently moved trucks around the base. It was an unusually clear winter day, cold and bright and urging them forward, towards their final mission.

_Chapter Twenty-One - End _


	22. The Heaviest Millstone

**Chapter Twenty-Two - The Heaviest Millstone**

The party of four watched as the Dysons' helicopter hovered over Base Brissend. Their own helicopter was now also close enough and low enough that they could see people on the ground emerge from inside the base and look up.

Kate grabbed the on-board radio transmitter. "Resistance, Resistance. Come in, come in. This is Kate Brewster Connor. Codeword: revelation. There is a hostile attack helicopter hovering within two hundred feet of Base Brissend, about to touch down. I need your armed reinforcement immediately. Do you copy?"

"_This is Kurt. I copy._"

A sizable group of people ran out from inside the hall and stood in the yard between the hangars.

"Prepare to defend," said Kate. "Over and out."

The Dysons' helicopter hovered for several minutes above the base, just high enough that the Resistance members on the ground did not have a sure enough aim to open fire. John and Kate expected them to touch down beside or over the base. They had flown their own helicopter closer, readying themselves to land at Base Brissend - mostly out of fear that it might break down at any moment now, given that black smoke was still emanating from the side that was shot.

But the Dysons' helicopter moved again and they flew past the base and over the hill, at this point disappearing from the sight of John's party. They couldn't see which direction the helicopter went beyond the hill; their own helicopter was too low now to get a good view.

"Damn cowards," muttered Tim. "Go after them, John."

"I want to, but we can't," John replied, pointing out the smoke. "We're going to have to touch down."

He drove the yoke and they gently touched down in the open yard bordered by the hangars. Tim pushed open the helicopter door and they all exited, squinting at the yellow dust kicked up by the landing.

"Oh, my god," said Kurt as John disembarked. "You're still alive."

"Apparently," replied John, walking right past Kurt with the least impressed expression he could muster.

"Hey, Kurt, you got another plane?" Tim said hurriedly in Kurt's face. "We gotta go find and stop Danny right now."

"Yeah, here, follow me," said Kurt. Leading Tim, they ran towards one of the hangars. Several other Resistance members joined them to pursue the Dysons.

John turned back to Kate and the Terminator, who were standing beside the landed helicopter, collecting themselves.

"Kate, come with me," John said. "We need to put that Terminator through the time machine, and then we can smash the machine to bits, and all this hell will be over." After a pause, he said more quietly, "Then we can have a normal life together, like you always wanted."

"What's normal?" said Kate, smiling wearily but fondly at him, laugh lines forming around her eyes.

"I have no idea."

They both chuckled and turned back to business, walking quickly with the Terminator towards the large hall that held the time machine; that is, as fast as they could, considering that Kate hadn't slept in almost a week and John had been shot twice by one Terminator and stabbed several times by another.

As they entered the hall, they noticed that the shutters and boards had been pulled off all the side windows, making the inside somewhat less gloomy and more bearable than when they were last there. The floor had also been cleared of any traces of the remains of their dead who had perished under the gunfire of the mutinied Terminators, months before. The way the hall looked now almost reminded them of the long-forgotten normality they longed for.

Ahead of them was the time machine, standing by. It waited there, glowing in its ominous dim green. And there on the floor by it, grouped beside the control panels and playing with a rubber kick ball, was a group of six children. The children of the Resistance.

"Hide!" whispered John, pulling Kate aside and directing their Terminator to follow. All three of them ducked behind the staircase to the mezzanine, out of sight of the children.

"What? What did you see?" said Kate. "Are the children in danger?"

"No, it's worse," said John. "Danny had a liquid metal Terminator that can disguise itself as a child. He set it loose and now it's somewhere."

"Oh, god...you're saying it might have terminated and replaced one of the children?" Kate panted.

John nodded. He hated to consider the possibility, but he couldn't ignore it. The words Danny spoke at Fort Spict echoed in his mind: _Remember, she can be anyone. Anyone. _

Then this fear of his was shoved to the forefront, because he heard footsteps above him, atop the mezzanine hallway. He looked up to the ceiling and he listened, breath held. Two pairs of footsteps. They walked slowly towards the back of the hallway. He squeezed his eyes shut. _Please, don't be them._

When he opened his eyes, the two people had reached the back of the hall where the other flight of stairs were, leading from the mezzanine down to the ground floor, to the time machine. And to his dismay, they were indeed Blythe and Danny Dyson. John did not know how they made it here, but flying their helicopter over to the next hill was some perfect distraction to remove the attention of Kurt and Tim and the other Resistance members from the most important place.

From where they stood above, Blythe and Danny looked at the children playing below. Even from this far, John could see Danny was grinning: a smug, self-satisfied grin. _I got you_, the look in his eyes said. But he didn't speak out. They were both quiet enough that the children didn't hear them and continued playing normally.

John turned around and looked at his Terminator. The Terminator was armed with a compact sniper rifle. John beckoned to him to pass the weapon. Holding the gun against the floor, John fixed his sights on the group of playing children, looking at them carefully through the scope.

"If I could shoot close to them, the Terminator will probably reveal itself," John said.

He aimed for the floor, but then stopped himself. The floor could easily make a bullet ricochet. He then aimed for the area just above their heads. As his finger rested on the trigger, one of the children stood up, falling into the line of fire. John flinched and took his hand off the trigger. There was no way he could fire without risking harm to one of these kids. He could've killed that kid right there.

At this point, he had a moment of clarity.

In that moment it astounded him that he even for a second contemplated such a thing as shooting at the children - the Resistance's children, humanity's children, _his_ children, too. He realised he had become an embodiment of the paranoia he felt so much dismay at seeing in his mother. He was about to risk harm to the innocent to save himself. Was this not the antithesis of what it meant to be a saviour?

John knew he would do anything to keep these children safe. There was nothing he had to lose that was greater than losing even one of these little ones. A Terminator lurked among them, masquerading as a child. He had to find out which one it was, and he knew there was one reliable way to do this, that would do the children no harm.

Danny's Terminator wasn't after the children: it was after him. Surely, it would reveal itself for a chance to kill John Connor.

"Stay where you are. Look and aim carefully. Once it attacks me you'll know which one it is, and shoot it, so the children have time to escape," John said to Kate.

"What? No!" said Kate. "No, no, no, John! Don't get close to them, there must be another way!"

John stood up, passing the rifle aside to Kate despite her protests and attempts to hold him back. He took his handgun out of the holster and laid it on the floor beside the rifle, safety on. Then he stepped out of cover, smiling warmly at the children.

"Hey buddies, I'm back," he said.

The children stopped and looked towards him. They were thrilled to see him. Laughing and squealing, they ran at him with their hands waving. He met them with open arms and felt the soft impacts as each one of them ran into him and hugged him.

From a distance, breath shaking, Kate reluctantly laid her finger on the trigger, looking through the scope at every detail of every child, afraid to blink.

As he welcomed the children to him, John expected the worst. As each child hugged him, he thought, at any moment now the little Terminator would reveal itself. He doubted he would have enough time to react at all. Any moment now, he was about to meet a death by impalement.

But the sensation of sharp metal he expected did not come. Instead, all he had before him were six adorable children, surrounding him in a warm group hug. Though his fear was still present as ever, the presence of the children was even stronger, and for the first time in a long time he relaxed a little.

He talked to the children, held their hands, patted their hair, dusted and straightened their shirt collars, helped tie up the undone laces on their worn and dirty shoes. He still expected that at any minute he would be impaled by a liquid metal knife, but even after many minutes, it never happened. He had closely looked at each and every child, all of whom he knew well, and there wasn't the slightest sign of a Terminator - just children happy to see their best friend and leader.

His hands holding the children's tiny hands, John looked up at Danny, who stood on the mezzanine balcony. Danny's grin had now turned into a shocked frown. At first John looked confused, too, but then he realised why there was no Terminator. John smiled at Danny, and his smile was entirely genuine, though with a little sadness too.

"I don't understand," said Danny.

"I do," replied John. "You left Fort Spict too fast, Danny. You didn't see the giant explosion that took out all your Terminators before they could leave."

Danny and Blythe looked at each other, bewildered expressions on their faces. Danny's hand clutched tightly onto the rail of the mezzanine balcony, his eyes darting around as he put the pieces together. Slowly, he nodded in realisation of his failure here.

"That's enough playing around, Messiah," Danny then said. He put his hand to his coat pocket and drew out his burst fire pistol. He sped down the stairs, opening fire at John. Blythe followed behind him.

John pulled the group of children down to the floor as the bullets rained sideways above their heads. "Run! Run!" he yelled, pointing to the door, as Danny was reloading.

His reload was not particularly fast. This man was a scientist and roboticist, but not an experienced fighter good at making quick decisions. The six children, on the other hand, having been raised in post-apocalyptic shelters constantly bombarded by Terminators, were well-rehearsed in survival skills. Killing them was not Danny's priority either, so they all soon disappeared out of the door, alive and well. Danny's attention was on John.

John ran towards the staircase as Danny shot at him. Kate and the Terminator emerged from behind the stairs, facing the Dysons, the Terminator holding the rifle and Kate armed with the handgun that John had left. Danny took cover behind the time machine, his hands and gun emerging and shooting at them.

Meanwhile, Blythe had taken her place behind the control panels and begun operating the buttons. Just as John and Kate reached the side of the platform, chasing after Danny, the time machine roared awake, the blaze of its lights drawing in every shred of other light in the hall.

_Chapter Twenty-Two - End_


	23. A Revelation (Finale)

**Chapter Twenty-Three - A Revelation (Finale) **

The platform shone with ethereal blue light, blinding them all, while the rest of the hall plunged into darkness. Now, within their sight there was just the time machine - the rest of the world had gone out, and everything important to them depended on what happened next to this time machine, or rather, who went through it.

When John and Kate took their hands off their eyes, they saw that Danny had climbed up onto the time machine platform. He stood still there, his features washed out by the beams of energy shooting from the machine's every arch.

Kate pulled back the bolt handle on her handgun and aimed it at Blythe. "Step back from there!" she shouted.

Blythe was hurriedly jamming on the buttons at the control panel, ignoring her. Kate repeated herself to Blythe, closing in on her. She held the gun to Blythe's head, but didn't have the heart to pull the trigger. She had been forced to do many things after Judgement Day, but one thing she couldn't do was murder, no matter how many lives her logical mind told her it would save.

As Kate's gun pressed against her forehead, Blythe pressed down on the initiation. Kate wrestled her to the floor, but it was too late. Blythe laughed, not even bothering to resist.

"Why didn't you shoot me while you could?" she taunted in Kate's face as Kate pinned her to the ground at gunpoint. "Too bad. We win."

Now the light was growing brighter on the platform. The light swallowed Danny and they could barely see him anymore. John ran to the control panel, working on the buttons to no avail. All the lights of the buttons had dimmed - the time machine was already in motion, set to send Danny back to the year 1995. There was no way to shut it down.

John turned to their Terminator. They couldn't stop it, so there was only one thing to do. "You! Get in! Get into the time machine now!" John shouted at the Terminator.

The Terminator obeyed and climbed onto the platform, holding his rifle. The silhouette of his body sliced through the beams of light, melting into the blaze. A moment of silence ensued. Then, Danny Dyson was thrown out of the time machine platform. He fell onto the floor with a shriek.

At the control panel, John managed to change the year to 2003, and the machine's light became slightly dimmer, its power reduced for the shorter time it needed to send through. All other processes were already set right, thanks to Blythe Dyson. John turned around to face the time machine, his back to the control panel. He could see the Terminator on the platform. The Terminator had assumed his standard crouched posture, ready to be sent through time with dignity - that is, as much dignity as could be preserved considering that he would, as usual, arrive naked. They had all become veterans of this strange process.

John stood there, smiling, his face flooded with light from the time machine. He was forty-seven years old this year, but this was the happiest moment of his life. Blinded by the light, he could almost see the peaceful lives the people would lead after today, the Resistance no longer needing to resist, the bright futures of the children. This was his purpose that he had been prophesied to do since before he was born. Now, it was finally about to be fulfilled. He couldn't help but think for an instant of the future he wanted for himself and Kate, too. Once their purposes were completed, maybe they could live for themselves.

But Danny had only been thrown down, not subdued. He scampered up from where he had been tossed, screaming in a flustered rage. He looked up at the time machine. "No! He's having his way again!" he wailed. He turned to his sister. "Blythe, your radio transmitter!"

Kate was still holding Blythe down on the floor, pinning her as she struggled to move. Blythe dug in her coat pocket, produced a small device and skidded it across the floor, over to Danny. Danny picked it up, turning it on and watching as a long antenna extruded out from the front. He then worked furiously at it. As he operated this device, the Terminator stood up on the time machine platform where he had been crouching still.

Kate gasped, letting go of Blythe. "It's the IEM controller!" she shouted to John.

The Terminator's body was already turning into white sparks of lightning and flowing away through time, responding sluggishly to Danny's signals. At the last moment, with angry tears all over his face, Danny commanded the Terminator one last time through the radio device. But rather than commanding it to leave the time machine, Danny instead commanded the Terminator to turn around and shoot John with its rifle. At the same instant the time machine's light snapped inwards, taking the Terminator twenty-nine years back, his rifle fired as Danny had commanded, creating a spark of light in the now-blackened hall which hit John and passed through him, cracking across the control panel behind him. John collapsed on the floor.

The control panel hissed and sparked, damaged by the shot. Then, all its lights went out, and with them the dim green lights of the time machine's arches disappeared too. That shot which Danny ordered had so precisely and inadvertently broken the time machine that he needed.

Then, after all the noise and conflict, the hall suddenly fell into a deep silence. The sounds of distant voices and movements and helicopter blades from elsewhere funneled through the roof and walls. But inside, all was quiet now. The light of the setting sun became dimmer through the hall's open door. The sunset cast a long column of orange light, centering on the darkened time machine.

"Oh, no," said Kate. She ran to John, falling down to her knees on the floor beside where he laid. "I'm going to get you help. Where is everyone?" she grabbed for the radio transceiver beside the control panel, but it didn't work. Everything in close proximity always went out after the time machine did its magic. The time machine's power was simply inordinate - it was so powerful, so destructive, just like the computer that created it. Now that it was destroyed, this perversion of time created by SkyNet was finally set right.

"Did it go through?" said John, taking hold of Kate's hand and gently pulling at her.

"No, it's not working," said Kate, desperately tapping on the transceiver.

"Did the Terminator go through, I mean."

Kate looked up wearily at the dark arches of the time machine. "Yes, I think so."

John sighed in relief. "It's over," he said, his breaths short. Lying there on the floor, he held up his hands and counted. "Now, every time-travelling Terminator we've seen is accounted for. No more Terminators."

He looked aside and saw the spent rifle shell lying on the floor from the shot the Terminator had fired. It had fallen from the platform and rolled across the tiles. John picked it up and examined it. It was still warm. Blood ran down the sleeves and shoulders of his tatty green jacket from the gunshot wound, gathering in a small pool on the floor tiles.

That Terminator was back in 2003 now. It would protect him and Kate from the T-X sent by Danny and sacrifice itself at Crystal Peak, having been reprogrammed by Kate and having killed John before being sent back. All the prophecies had come to a full circle - it turns out that after all, they weren't wrong, and they all fell into place perfectly in the end. His life's mission was accomplished, yet not in the way he had hoped. All the dreams of a life after defeating SkyNet that he had believed in so vividly regardless of the warning, were gone. He felt he deserved a peaceful life after a lifetime of struggle, but it was not to be. He closed his fingers around the spent shell and clutched it tightly. Why did he have to die?

John looked up at Kate. Despair and anger had been filling him, but as he met the eyes of the woman he loved, John instead felt strangely peaceful, despite the pain of the gunshot searing through his body and making each breath harder than the last. He reached up and touched her face, gazing over the familiar features. She meant the world to him. Maybe this small moment with her was reward enough. Maybe he could accept this.

"Yes, it's finally over," Kate whispered, holding his hand in hers. Through tears, she smiled.

John smiled back at her. "I love you, Kate," he said.

The fading light from the sunset stretched all the way across the hall floor, laid like a pillar against the far wall, over the mezzanine. Now it was a waning pink of dusk.

Blythe and Danny stood there speechlessly, shoulders slumped, staring at the platform of the lightless time machine. They were in a pain of a different kind. Now nothing remained on the time machine platform except for a pile of old clothes and a rifle. They commanded the Terminator to destroy, and destroy it did. They had been hoist by their own petard. The blank look on their faces stayed for a long time. Just like John, their lives had been built around a singular purpose, only theirs was vengeance. And now everything they worked for was for nothing. Should they have laughed or cried?

"John! Kate!" A voice called from across the hall. Tim appeared at the door, followed by Kurt and a group of their friends. The Resistance, framed by the light of dusk, burnt silhouettes of fiery strength, had finally come to join them. They were all together again - late, but never too late. Ava was among them too, with one kind woman from the Resistance helping her along.

Blythe and Danny tried to sidle away as the members of the Resistance ran to attend to John. A few soldiers surrounded them at gunpoint and ordered them to drop to the floor with their hands raised. The brother and sister were taken away, where at some point they, too, would have to find acceptance. With the time machine gone, there was no more changing the past. Perhaps, being such talented computer engineers, they would eventually make something great and help to rebuild the world as it was.

John was surrounded by his large group of friends, looking over him, while above them the ceiling lights twinkled as they were relit one by one, the time machine's power now gone for good. Some tried to help him, but many were trying to apologise for having doubted him and believed the worst about him.

"I'm sorry John, I should've known better, I should've known better," said Kurt tearfully, crouching beside John. "I was angry. I was angry at the world and I blamed it on you. I led all the people to kill you. I could've destroyed everything. I can't ask you to ever forgive me."

"We should've done better. We fell into their trap," another Resistance member said.

"John, I'm so sorry. We'd been attacked a lot by Terminators before. But that time we turned on you instead of working together like you taught us."

"How could we ever..."

But John assured them all that everything was fine. "It's okay. You don't need to be sorry. No, I don't blame you. Not you, either. Life is so, so hard on all of you. You're all the best. It's going to get better from now," he said, holding their hands as they all huddled around him, crying tears of relief, of joy, of sadness - of humanity.

And John meant every word he said. It made him happy and hopeful to see his friends gathered around him, united again. He could see the future that they would create: the world, rebuilt and beautiful once more. No matter what seemingly insurmountable odds it faced, humanity would always prevail. Like a child learning to walk, it would fall and fall and rise and rise again with a smile on its face, learning from its mistakes, and walk forward towards the future it was destined to make for itself. John looked up at all the people crowded around him as his vision of their faces blurred and darkened.

He believed in them.

_The Catch - End_


End file.
